> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50.
This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.
Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops.
I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop.
Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not possible, because all the laptops had Office pre-installed. I told him i did not care and wanted to buy the laptop for the adverstised price.
After 15 minutes of discussion, some manager came frustrated what the problem was. I pointed to the price tag and told him i wanted to buy the laptop for that price exactly and if that was possible. It was, but it would require uninstalling Office, which took them another 15 minutes.
So i waited for another 15 minutes so they could remove Office. Back at home i powered on the laptop, popped in a usb disk and removed every partition that its harddisk ever had and started a nice fresh install without any bloatware.
The irony is even though Dollar Tree prices are honest because they all are the same $1.25 (excluding the new “More Choices” $3-5 items) they’re still ripping you off. I always shop on a per-unit basis e.g. dollars per pound or cents per ounce, since that’s how I actually eat food. I need a certain amount of calories and a certain quantity of food to survive, and the less I pay per unit, the lower overall cost. On a per-unit basis, DT is almost always the most expensive store around, because quantities are so small!
There are of course exceptions; I can recall not long ago for example buying a pound of Himalayan sea salt for a dollar. That was a solid deal, and I haven’t seen it since.
But generally speaking, if you want to save money, don’t go to Dollar Tree.
And yes there are times when some cannot always afford bigger quantities. But we’re not talking about 50 pound bags at Costco here; The price per pound for a ten pound bag of something at Walmart vs a six ouncer at DT is substantial.
We used to buy raspberries, blackberries, blueberries etc at Dollar Stores. They wouldn't last a week in the fridge which is why they were at the Dollar Store, but we were eating them same-day or next day so spoilage wasn't a concern. Really helped the berry budget with toddlers.
That sounds like it's basically the grocery equivalent of the boot theory of poverty. Poor people have to pay more in the long run because they can't afford to buy in bulk.
It’s slightly different for groceries. I am not poor but I also don’t want to buy perishables in bulk. I can choose to buy one week’s worth of lettuce to be eaten in a week, but by the seventh day the lettuce has visibly degraded. I want fresher produce, so I am willing to buy smaller amounts every two days.
When they say "groceries" they're not just referring to fresh produce but also to things like cereal, dried goods, canned goods, or other foods you might find at a dollar store. Though some of these stores like Dollar General do also stock fresh foods like eggs, meat, dairy, and produce.
This is exactly right and the reason that Costco shoppers are un-intuitively among the richest groups in the country (average $125,000 household income).
Costco is great for wealthy families, less so for less wealthy. People living in small apartments have no place to put 36 rolls of paper towels and 12 jars of pasta sauce.
Having a large home is a prerequisite for shopping at Costco.
We live in an apartment but use Costco to stock our freezer with meat and seafood. We also use it for gas, cat litter, eggs, and cheese (lasts a long time). Basically for perishables that only need to be stored so long.
In addition to the other comment about perishables, storage space is another meaningful limiting factor that can vary with income level. Both the raw volume of available storage and the quality of the storage on things like temperature control, energy usage, accessibility, etc
There are some things at dollar tree that are a good deal and some that aren't.
I think part of the appeal when everything was a dollar was so that people would know exactly how much it would be when they went to check out. Then they could manage a little bit of money with precision.
Dollar Tree regular items aren’t all $1.25 anymore. Maybe half of what I’ve purchased there recently (mostly craft/gift wrap/party supplies) have changed to $1.50 or $1.75. If you grab multiple of the same item each one can ring up a different price.
Is there any reason to assume they are “so focused” on it? Keeping an eye on unit or per-weight prices is somewhat conventional and pretty easy—at least I think most major grocery chains around here include that info right on the sticker.
At least where I'm at they're legally required to include that info and they appear to comply maliciously whenever possible. Sometimes it's slightly wrong. Often the unit of weight changes between items of the same sort. It's absurd.
You did not understand the comment. The person is talking about units per dollar, not necessarily calories per dollar, or anything about health. If I can buy one sponge for $1.25 and three sponges for $3, for example, I prefer three. This has nothing to do with how many calories are in a sponge.
That's actually fascinating, because they surely weren't tracking the actual Office license keys, and getting their money back. The manager literally uninstalled Office just to spite you. That's super funny! Especially since it made zero difference to you in the end.
I worked at Geek Squad almost 20 years ago and here’s how it went.
We would preinstall office on say 80% of the door buster laptops for something like $29. Most people used office so they’d pay it. Occasionally some people didn’t want it so they’d buy a bare laptop.
If all the bare laptops had been sold, we’d remove office from one of the preinstalled laptops. Then we’d take the box and send it back to the inventory guys to process and get credit back from the vendor. As part of that process we were supposed to verify to Microsoft that the product wasn’t installed on any machines.
So they weren’t tracking keys, but the manager wasn’t doing it to spite the OP, he was just doing what the vendor asked for.
Oh thanks, that's really interesting. It makes more sense if there's a physical box involved -- I don't remember ever getting physical boxes for preinstalled software, but it makes sense that way.
I do. Up until 2005ish, Office install CDs and the code would be in the box with the PC. You needed them if you wanted to install optional features (or reinstall). Stores rarely did the full install.
I give it an even split between spite and genuinely not understanding how software licensing is tracked/preinstalled trials work, thinking "if they don't buy the office addon I need to make sure they don't receive one with the office addon" as they would have to do with most other products.
I did many of these preinstalls 20 years ago. When you get credit back from Microsoft they ask you to make sure the key isn’t installed anywhere. They don’t track it, but it is a retirement from the vendor not a misunderstanding on the part of the manager.
I was really waiting for this to be a Windows bloatware where Linux laptops are cheaper since there's no unnecessary Microsoft license at all. So you are principled in not wanting to use Office, but unprincipled enough to go ahead and use Windows?? That's a bold position on HN. Linux or death!!!!
My brother in law needed that laptop for his studies back then. Since he does not annoy me with countless IT related requests like some other family members tend to do and he did not have much money, i did some research for him. School supplied all the necessary licenses for free and i installed an extremely optimised Windows.
This is possible in the US but I'm sure in many other countries too where electronics and computer stores exist, not even counting the wide swath of Apple stores around the world.
Note that this law is only for certain products. We would have people at the liquor store I used to own point out mislabeling occasionally and claim we owed them the $10 difference from this law. While we tried to work with customers when we made a pricing error, not only does the accuracy law not apply to alcoholic beverages, but it would often be illegal for us to offer the customer the mistaken price. Alcohol retailers in MA are not legally allowed to sell their products for less than they purchased them.
I assume eliminating the "loss leader" concept is the main effect, since shops shouldn't otherwise price things as losses regardless? In which case it seems like it's meant to maintain some friction / overhead for people wanting to visit the stores, possibly reducing consumption at least for the price-sensitive.
In Texas the law exists as well, phrased as cannot offer price below wholesale price for alcohol which in effect bans “bottomless/all you can drink” deals as well. It is indeed designed as a way to discourage consumption
Selling at a loss can also be a monopolistic practice: a firm with enough capital can sell at a loss to capture the market, and then buy out their now-flailing competition.
(That being said, even though I think it's a silly rule, it just seems to exist to annoy alcoholics who can't plan ahead. I'm not an alcoholic, and I rarely consume alcohol before noon, so I just laugh at people who whine about this law.)
Was at the airport on a trip with friends with the flight leaving before noon. None of the bars could sell. We are not alcoholics, but we were on vacation. Well, we were trying to start the vacation but had to wait until leaving uptight red state
> Well, we were trying to start the vacation but had to wait until leaving uptight red state
I live in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, and we still have special laws about Alcohol on Sunday. According to Gemini, Logan airport can't start serving until 10 a.m. (Because in Massachusetts, we don't want you getting drunk on the way to your Unitarian or interfaith Sunday service after you get off of your red-eye flight.)
it's aimed at not encouraging consumption which is slightly different. you can have a "hungry hour" where you entice people with food bargains and sell them alcohol, but you can't have a "happy hour" where you entice people with alcohol bargains.
it is also in keeping with other laws intended to create a competitive/collusion free market (not saying the crafting of those laws was not influenced by incumbents trying to maintain their share)
> When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.
In Australia, when scanners became common, the law was "in the event of a mismatch, the consumer gets first item free, and any subsequent items at the lower price".
Michigan in the 90s had a similar rule. Customer gets 10x the overcharge (up to $5 max). I can guarantee you they fixed the price immediately.
Where I live there’s no such rule I can tell you no one is correcting the price when I point out that I got overcharged (they usually shrug with “it does that sometimes”).
It's different in different states. In Maryland, once a complaint is filed with the relevant authority, the store has a certain number of days to correct pricing. Most retailers will give you the misprice if it's clearly their fault in not changing the tags, as a matter of policy.
The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they're entitled to not just prices on tags that haven't been updated, but prices for what are clearly entirely different products.
Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items?
If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level.
This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts.
The store is often literally the only option in town. The wouldn’t even need to sell excess warehouse inventory at the advertised price, since they could just shift supply to another state (or county/store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).
This seems to be the handbook for price complaint inspections following a complaint to the relevant authority (in this case, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General).
Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)
I live in MA and wish that this were true, but do you have data / evidence to support that it rarely happens?
Also, I don't know if you have tried to get your $10, but it's not like the sign is always obvious and every time I've tried, it's not like the cashier says "oops" and gives you the thing for free - they call a manager, the manager argues with you, other customers complain about the checkout delay you've created... there's social pressure there so I can understand why customers would not do this even when they can.
I've done this many times, and it usually takes about 5min (which sounds short, but isn't really that short). There is social pressure, but it's even stronger on the store than it is on you as a customer.
Right, as a UK tabloid I'm surprised they didn't mention that the UK has similar laws. If you are overcharged you can ask for a refund, and the store has to honour it:
In the 00s I worked for a supermarket that would always honour the price on the label if you pointed out an error (we'd then remove the label with the error).
We had teams that would regularly check all the labels to make sure they are not out of date. Nowadays many stores where I live now use e-paper displays that update automatically.
Family Dollar and Dollar General (the subjects of this piece) are not traditional “dollar stores” (and haven’t been in a long time) despite having Dollar in the name. They’re just discount stores, like a smaller Wal-Mart. Dollar Tree, on the other hand, had long been a traditional dollar store where most items are priced at a dollar. However after pandemic-induced inflation they have mostly changed to a $1.25-$1.50 price point and now have a number of items marked above that as well.
Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.
In 2025, Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar to a group of private-equity firms: Brigade Capital Management, Macellum Capital Management and Arkhouse Management Co.
It’s a business model cosplaying as poverty relief while quietly siphoning money from the people least able to lose it. They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model. That 23% increase is not a glitch. They know their customers can’t drive across town to complain. They know the regulators won’t scale fines to revenue.
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.
And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call
Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - info that often conflicts with public statements and reports to govs.
Like CapEx expenditures/forecast and the actual reasons that certain segments over/underperform. It's a solid way to catch corporations issuing bald-faced lies (for any press, public, gov that are paying attention).
AT&T PR: Net Neutrality is tanking our infra investment
ATT's EC: CapEx is high and that will continue
I'll bet 1 share that there are moves to get this admin to do away with the requirement.
One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't know what's going on, because by definition you can't know, not outside those 4 times a year. In which case there's a reasonable chance the requirement to do so is the only thing that's kept it from going off the rails.
I rarely agree with Trump, but I'm a former exec at a public company and he's not wrong. You need a horde of lawyers and accountants and investor relations and SOX compliance people and auditors etc for the earnings reports. SOX adds burdensome processes at every layer of the organization. Your CFO and CEO will be preoccupied by earnings. It's a real disincentive for a small/medium cap company to go (or stay) public. A PE firm taking a company private can get rid of all this overhead on Day 1.
Not to mention, quarterly reports incentivize a company to focus on the current quarter instead of longer-term sustainability. Reporting twice a year doesn't solve all the above problems, but it sure would reduce them a little.
Worth noting, though, that the SOX "burden" came out of Enron and WorldCom. I'd be willing to debate the actual mechanics of the burden and see if streamlining the regulations for modern companies is possible, but I won't accept that the burden is unjustified.
Yes, opaque accounting was a real problem. I would love to see a more streamlined, modern take on SOX. Today's SOX, in practice feels like a box-checking exercise and mandatory funneling of money to accounting firms who don't understand the intricacies of (among other things) modern software development. They forced inefficient processes on my company and weren't willing to discuss smarter solutions. No doubt there are better SOX auditors & consultants than I dealt with. But its part of the reason companies now stay private for longer and prefer secondary rounds for employee liquidity. So now retail investors miss out on the action, while accredited investors have even less transparency than a pre-SOX public company.
Almost all insiders file trading plans far in advance as a defense against accusations of insider trading. Twice-a-year reporting actually makes it harder for insiders because they will have to file their trading plans further in advance. And it doesn't stop shareholders from suing insiders if they believe there was actual insider trading.
Wait, where in this proposal did you see a change in requirements around planned selling? My assumption, perhaps unfair, certainty supported by trends in US lawlessness, is that the whole scheme is to change reporting but not windows for planned sales.
There is a huge difference between reconciling things for your own business strategy and reconciling things in accordance with federal public company reporting standards for publicly traded companies.
That doesn’t change anything: there isn’t anything in the reporting requirements that I can look at and say “that’s useless I wouldn’t want to know that about my business”
There are entire classes in graduate school (I am an MBA dropout) that specifically focus on Management Accounting used to make internal decisions that are different than the accounting that you have to do for public accounting.
I don’t care about the GAAP depreciation guidelines when I’m deciding something if my own internal metrics show that I can get twice the useful life out of equipment
>If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.
Under the existing legal and regulatory model, yes.
But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.
> what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse
The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less.
My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.
Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.
And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to do without having the calculation already?
> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.
I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.
It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue.
A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.
Why do it for entities of that size at all? It's not about their type of incorporation, it's about not adding more paperwork for small businesses.
You're using or. That means you don't need a low revenue number. You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless, so all you need is to catch the few outliers that manage to be major companies without hitting the employee threshold.
So? At 10M revenue what are the chances they don't have an accountant who does their taxes and already has all the relevant info? Asking their accountant to crank out one extra form is not going to break the bank.
> But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits
After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass.
Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.
I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom.
How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities.
For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives:
destruction of ecosystems
deforestation and rainforest loss
collapse of fisheries and ocean systems
factory farming / industrialized animal suffering
desertification of farmland
strip mining and toxic waste dumping
privatization and depletion of freshwater
carbon emissions and climate destabilization
environmental injustice and poisoning of local communities
lobbying to block regulation and accountability
social media addiction design for engagement metrics
monopolization and killing off smaller competitors
offshoring, wage stagnation, and worker precarity
financialization of everything (housing, healthcare, education)
political capture to preserve the whole machine
This is not some random accident, this is the inevitable equilibrium of shareholder primacy.
The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act.
That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet.
And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist.
Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders.
1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine).
1980s:Shareholder primacy took over.
Hostile takeovers forced boards into short-termism.
Executive compensation was tied tightly to stock price.
Financialization embedded all of this into corporate DNA.
Shareholders were not always in control. Their dominance "waxed and waned," and the current form of shareholder primacy is a late-20th-century financial ideology posing as an eternal law of nature.
If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.
While I get your frustration, the root cause of the issue is not shareholder value maximisation, it's the failure modes of the free market.
Monopolies, lack of transparency, lack of competition, regulatory capture, failure to price in externalities are what allows this to happen.
And these failure modes are allowed to persist due to lobbying, normalised corruption, and the desire for a small/weak government.
The latter is useful for corporations, as it limits regulation, which is the main way these failure modes are supposed to be managed. Yes, too much/bad regulation is detrimental, but so is no/weak regulation.
The more baffling thing is that the modal American voter supports lax regulation and pro-corporate rules at their own personal expense.
1. Investors who want to invest in companies with a growth story and want the company to grow bigger and be “successful” enough to exit either via an acquisition or the public market. But often times these days, just to pawn off to the greater fool.
2. Investors who want to go in and make the company worse and do enough value extraction for short term gains. The canonical case is when a restaurant chain owns its own real estate. They split off the restaurant from the underlying real estate and make the restaurant pay rent that goes up. The restaurant flounders and the real estate holdings increase in value.
And another strategy is to acquire companies in your vertical, roll them all up, fire redundant staff and integrate systems and then exit. Of course you enshitify the smaller once independent mom and pop systems in the process.
There can be many models. One model is just to have shares expire after a certain point, the same way options do. Or undergo demurrage (a discount that grows from 0 to 100% over a decade, for instance, where the remaining % from the sale goes back to the ecosystem and is distributed as UBI to all tokenholders).
In fact, staking your shares and getting a perpetual flow of utility tokens, or selling the shares, could be a good compromise. But the shares would cease to confer voting power or dividends. The dividends would be paid out in the utility token itself. So the utility tokens might get devalued if there are too many of them, or they could be burned as transaction fees for instance, reducing their supply. There are a ton of possibilities.
Reinterpreting shares as something like a bond with a yield in the ecosystem's own currency makes things much more sustainable. Yes, the shareholders would still want the ecosystem's growth to outpace the token issuance, but also, they could just increase the fees' burn rate of tokens. But that's like extracting rents. So yes, I think eventually, shares should simply get less and less dividends over time. Look at the Miracle of Worgl and their currency undergoing demurrage, for instance.
In the ideal scenario, though, new companies would have no IPO ever, only ICO of utility tokens. Just make IPOs almost impossible to do from a regulatory point of view. It's becoming rare anyway. This would mean that early shareholders would get their returns by staking shares and receiving utility tokens which they sell to ecosystem participants (so they're incentivized to help grow the entire ecosystem, refer new customers etc.) And eventually, the market cap of the shares is totally phased out due to demurrage and the utility tokens is all that remains.
Or perhaps we go one step further by making shareholders also owners. They get to take their part (as determined by the amount of shares they possess) of the profits and equally have to cough up their part of the losses.
This would return closer to the model where you invest into a business because you believe in it.
Stop trying to reimagine stocks as crypto to try to justify a failed attempt at manifesting a problem that cryptocurrency can attempt to be a solution to.
Stop hating on crypto just because you're on HN, and consider that actual problems have grown very large with current systems. This is the problem with many HN denizens -- they keep correctly posting about problems, but then dismiss solutions out of hand because they're against the groupthink. Then 10 years later the problem is worse, but you get triggered by the word "cryptocurrency" (which by the way I didn't even say).
As a result, you totally ignore the very real problems that get bigger and bigger due to late-stage shareholder capitalism, and call it a "failed attempt to manifest" the problems.
I'm not saying this out of groupthink. If you just change the word "stocks" to "token", and don't change the fundamentals of ownership of "stocks" being basically indicated by entries in the ledger of an asset tracking company, that provides a foundation for conducting trades for financial gains at the stroke of a pen you've accomplished nothing. In the transformation to tracking the same damn thing with a block chain or crypto token, if you're providing the same abstractive benefits, you've got nothing but a change in detail, but not in kind. Tokens will be traded on info or trends as monied interest recognizes value to be squeezed out of the fact of owning a share, having voting rights/influence on operations, or claim to a flow of future value. Same shit, different wrapper, it's just a token now, and we're blowing eith bookoo power doing PoW, or creating more centralization through PoS, to process transactions that were previously accomplished with an entry in one of a handful of company's databases, and some paperwork.
So if you want to sell tokenization as not being stocks/shares by another name, tell me how you're changing the fundamentals. I buy into ventures to say, get dividends, or knowing I'll lose money, but hoping to see something manifest that I want to see that may not be profitable yet, but I want to be a part of. How does your change to tokens differ at all, from me buying shares of stock?
If you can't provide an answer to that, I continue to stand by my original statement. Unless, of course, you're being a proponent of a public database of beneficial ownership of all legal fictions. In which case you might get some interest out of me, but I guarantee you'll run into other forms of Dead on Arrival until you fix/address the whole problem around said database basically provides a map for targeting all of the top centralizations of capital, which none of those individuals will probably be okay with being the case to the degree it will be prevented through buying out political clout.
Thinking it's a good idea to abolish private ownership because of the most pathological cases is probably sawing off the branch you're sitting that keeps you away from socialism and mass starvation policies.
I'm not sure why private equity is singled out here, when every time a public company does a bad (eg. Boeing), people crow about how public companies only care about juicing next quarter's earnings.
The big difference is the extent to which PE will go to juice the quarters earnings. Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back. PE will do all of the above and more if it means they get their money. Which means, you as a customer get screwed over more when PE is involved.
>Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back.
Why? Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.
And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you start intentionally sinking it.
> PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.
Not all PEs model. The ones you are referring to are often buying large businesses (like the infamous Toys R Us) load them with debt and strip their assets. 90% of the other PEs out there do not do this...in fact the opposite. They put capital on their balance sheet to grow.
What is the "company itself" if not its owners (private equity company that is)? Everything else is just an asset of it. If they see a way to maximise profit by draining the company that's better than any other one, why not? After all if company is then simply liquidated, it frees up market opportunity for new entrants.
Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline, and everybody knows it. There is absolutely no incentive to add value beyond the next sale, and often you only need to add the perception of value. To quote my CTO of a PE owned company: "we want to make it look like we're on the road to <big investment in strategic roadmap>", not actually accomplish it
> Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline
Berkshire Hathaway is a PE fund with permanent capital.
Broadly speaking, making generalisatios about PE is almost impossible because it's an asset class which is, essentially, all non-public business. Instead, it's more useful to think about which element private equity touches you're specifically complaining about: capitalism in general, financial transparency, leverage and liability.
The problem with PE is only the hyper aggressive and generally terrible ones make the news.
The quiet ones that simply run business well, don't make the news.
There are PE firms that specialize in rescuing distressed companies with potential and turning them around. In many cases not firing anyone and holding onto the form they acquired for a long time.
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
There's a pattern of behavior, to be sure. The primary control on public companies is shareholder scrutiny. Gutting your company for short term gains, is not always popular. The more diverse the shareholder cohort, the less popular it tends to be.
Private companies don't mind it when they can literally start a new company with the assets from the old without the pesky plebian investors.
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
It's more about Private Equity firms than private companies. The oversimplified TL;DR strategy for most PE firms is acquire, strip, pump, then dump (combined with all sorts of tax strategies). Most PE firms don't own the companies themselves, but act on behalf of investors and take a cut of the ultimate profits. So it's basically tons of short term thinking.
To me PE is just secondary effect of incentivizing private pension schemes over pay-as-you-go schemes in the last half century to me.
A huge wealth transfer in disguise providing capital to financial actors (not at last PE) that are usually not aligned with goals of regular employess: affordable housing and healtcare and reasonably safe jobs.
As Germany is on it's way to dismantle it's core of it's pay-as-you-go mandatory state pension insurance and shift towards private, and privat-by-proxy schemes via company pension plans. Europe might be also going that way some time in the near future, but without the comparably healthy demographics of the US.
Funny that all those charts eventually go back to Carter allowing for 401k not, Reagan, though that reuse only happened later.
My bigger hunch here is supplying the capital markets with that much additional money was a mistake, that ultimately lead to the current guilded age and accelarated existing trends of in the productivity–pay gap, social stratification and wealth inequality, if not solely being responsible for it.
It seems outright impossible for most to compete with a economic reality where the accrued value of like a third of your and everyone else's paycheck is actively working against your net quality of living, when you're not in the top 1 to 10% where the capital gains are a still a net positive over the increased cost of housing and wage stagflation etc.
No? Companies aren't about making things anymore, they're about stock buybacks and making as much money as possible while doing as little as possible (or selling our data). That's why the refrigerators have ads and break after two years. At least private equity is more honest about being vulchers, whereas Kohler is going to look you dead in the eyes and try to convince you you need a toilet with a camera in it. What a joke.
>At least private equity is more honest about being vulchers,
Again, what's the basis of this? Half the people in this thread seem to take it for granted that PE is somehow "worse" than public companies, but can't seem to articulate why. The only legal difference between public companies and "private equity" is that the former has stricter reporting requirements and can be bought by non-accredited investors. There's nothing about "ostensibly, trying to make a good or provide a service" or whatever.
PE does this wealth extraction trick which breeds the ill-will.
Eg: purchase a few mom&pop veterinarian business in some area. Squeeze the service rates, trim hours, reduce staff, add some debt. The PE investor gets cash out - the business is destroyed and the community loses a (critical? valuable?) service.
It's a common pattern. But not all PE is like this. Like "not all men" and "not all guns" - but enough that the pattern is easily associated - and disliked by many w/o the power to keep them out.
I think generally it is a complaint against the soullessness of corporatism versus ownership that actually cares about delivering a good product and treating their customers and employees right.
Greed is very high right now. And you can see that in the behavior of all types of companies. Historically when greed is high like this you eventually end up with a Lehman Bros or Enron situation that causes a painful market place correction.
Private equity is far worse. It means 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all.
At least public companies have some diversity in ownership and agenda.
>Private equity is far worse. It’s mean 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all.
...as opposed to the average public company? An average company might have more "average joe" shareholders (almost by definition, because private equity is typically off limits to non-accredited investors), but outside of meme stocks, there's not enough of them to make a difference. The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.
I see these private equity takes on HN frequently and am really baffled by the ignorance. There's a very clear difference between a public and private company - the fiduciary duty to shareholders.
There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.
There is no such requirement for a private company. In practice (esp. recent history), this means private equity firms acquire successful businesses to "mine them" of their wealth - capitalizing their assets for personal gain, and leaving nothing left.
The question for public companies isn't how many retail vs institutional investors they have, it's whether an investor can make a claim about a breach of fiduciary duty. It's patently false to say that the institutional investors (who yes, do have more sway) aren't interested in the company acting in their financial interests.
> There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders
No, there isn't.
The whole point of Revlon duties is that they trigger "in certain limited circumstances indicating that the 'sale' or 'break-up' of the company is inevitable" [1]. Outside those conditions, "the singular responsibility of the board" is not "to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available."
> There is no such requirement for a private company
Are you thinking of minority rights? These vary based on whether a company is closely held or not [2], not whether it's public or private.
Why bring up Revlon duties when as you say, their relevance is only during company acquisition or restructuring?
It's well established over hundreds of years of case law that directors of public companies have to act in good faith to benefit the company (and therefore, the shareholders).
> Why bring up Revlon duties when as you say, their relevance is only during company acquisition or restructuring?
It’s an exception that proves the rule. In that specific case, what you’re saying applies. In all others, it does not.
> It's well established over hundreds of years of case law
Where are you getting this from?
> directors of public companies have to act in good faith to benefit the company (and therefore, the shareholders)
Where did you get that this only applies to public companies? What you’re describing is basic English and Delaware corporate law.
Also, there is a massive difference between “all shareholders” and “the shareholders”. And nothing about public companies says they can’t be structured in a way that sometimes undermines some shareholders. This comes up most commonly when different shares have different voting or blocking rights. But it’s also fundamental to the intent behind B Corps, publicly traded or not.
> seriously doubt you're operating sincerely in this thread, given your ability to cite Revlon
I know about the topic and can correctly cite sources, herego I'm operating insincerely?
> start here [1]
You're citing a 1919 Michigan state court decision concerning the Ford Motor Company. Ford went public in 1956 [2]. The sole source you've cited is about a then-private company from over 100 years ago.
You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.
You're operating insincerely by attacking low quality interpretations of what I'm saying, among other problems. For example:
> You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.
Wouldn't that mean my statement is incomplete, not "doubly wrong", if it applies to all businesses, not just public ones?
Similarly, cherry picking sources that support narrow scenarios tangential to the discussion (Revlon) is not sincere.
By this point it's clear your religious grasp on the distinction between public and private companies will not be shaken. I'll continue living in reality, where in fact directors of private companies do act against the interests of the company itself (and in practice are still in accordance with the law), paying themselves off and leaving an insolvent heap. I'm honestly shocked regarding your insistence that public and private companies are the same in this matter; I can only assume that you already have, or stand to, gain from such a private endeavor, and this is causing a cognitive dissonance that is at fault for the vomit you've spewed above. Good day.
>There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.
All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures. It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
Yes, that's the major difference between the public and PE companies that OP was highlighting. The owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures. They have to sell it off to someone else to do that.
Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders.
> owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures
This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
> Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders
Merger law is largely state corporate law. If you have a Delaware C corporation, you're operating under more or less the same merger rules irrespective of how your stock is traded.
What may be misleading some folks is that in a private company, these deliberations are typically covered by NDAs. In public companies, it happens in the open. With private companies, someone needs to get pissed off enough to sue. Herego the understandable availability bias.
To drive home how misleading this purported delineation is, consider that some of the largest private equity managers (e.g. Blackstone and KKR) are themselves publicly traded.
Private equity has tons of issues. Tons. In some industries (e.g. healthcare) it shouldn’t exist. But this tripe about public companies having duties to shareholders which private companies don’t is nonsense.
> This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe…
> All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures
Yes, you're getting it now.
> It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread - the sale itself is required to maximally benefit the shareholders.
Public companies are interested in quarterly profits. But for the most part still have longer term goals and don’t purposefully make decisions that will make the company worse off in the long term.
Apple is not going to sell off all of its real estate into separate company, force the other half to rent it and then sell off the rental holdings. Even when it was almost bankrupt it didn’t “shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders”.
The former is a standard PE play. I’ve been part of the “roll up small companies and enshittify them and go public” playbook. I was the lead architect at the parent company designing the software system that integrated the disparate systems of the target companies.
Funny enough I worked for a startup that I loved in 2018-2020 and only left because a job at BigTech fell into my lap. After leaving BigTech in 2023, the company that acquired the startup I worked for (a PE backed acquire and enshittify company) offered me a job as the architect to consolidate their systems based on a referral. I booed out after having a lot of discussions with their internal management and one with a representative from their investor.
It’s hell being under the thumb of a PE companies management (not the internal management) they second guess everything and the level they were hiring me for, I would have dealt with the PE investors representatives directly
If someone is baffled that the tone of a private equity company’s message board is pro private equity then I think it’s an excellent reminder.
I think it’s useful to point out that Silcon Valley is a rapaciously predatory and financialized business climate precisely because because they spend so much time and money on PR to convince everyone otherwise.
The biggest difference is not the morality of the management of the two types of companies, but the type of business they are into.
Many private companies are growth businesses. On the opposite side, private equity targets businesses which are stable, but not growing or declining. PE looks for products which have high cost to switch or products with no alternatives.
So when private equity buys the business they extract money in 3 ways:
- Raise their prices. This is similar to the public companies, but they do it more aggressively, because their customers don't have a choice. For reference see, what VMWare did after it was bought by Broadcom (Broadcom is a public company which acts as a private equity).
- Reduce costs, via layoffs and cutting smaller products. Also done by public companies, but the difference here is the magnitude. It is quite common for Private equity owned companies to have several years of 20% layoffs, until the original workers are completely replaced by workers in cheaper locations. Or not replaced at all which leads to a worse service.
- And finally the third way a private equity extracts money from the acquired company by providing "services". Employees from the PE company are elected on the board of directors of the acquired company. A PE executive can become a CEO of an acquired company. PE companies have satellite companies, which provide legal, administrative and financial services to their companies.
On top of that the acquired company has to pay the loan which was used to be acquired.
* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit
* But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
In other words, PEs almost never lose money, so they could extract the last bit of a company, even more short sighted than shareholders of a public company
> If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit. But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
This isn't remotely true. Plenty of private equity investments go bust before they can pay themselves back. And plenty of public company investors milked a company for interest payments or dividends into the ground.
> PEs almost never lose money
Private equity funds regularly lose money. Usually to lenders.
You're complaining about leverage in general. Probably not private equity per se.
>* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit
That's not necessarily a bad thing, or sign of anything sinister. If a business is failing, and you buy it for pennies on the dollar, and despite your best efforts it still goes under, so you liquidate it, you can still turn a profit if the price you paid is lower than what you got from liquidating it. That's not bad, because private equity (or anyone else, for that matter) isn't expected to operate as a charity. The only reason they're willing to stump up the cash to buy the business in the first place is the expectation that they'll make money. It's also not bad for the original owners either, because the fact that they hold to PE rather than someone else, or liquidating it, suggests that the PE offered a better deal than either.
>But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
If you’ve ever spoken to employees of a public company that was sold to private equity, you’ll know how much of a difference there is. It is a significant difference.
> The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.
Right but they are seeking the highest returns as equity holders typically, usually through things like stock buybacks.
Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.
If you’ve ever seen the Goodfellas scene where they bust out the nightclub, that’s quite literally their business model.
>Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.
"looting the companies" is non-nonsensical when they also own it. It's like saying a scrap yard is "looting" the cars it bought by taking out the valuable parts to resell or whatever. The rest of the stuff might make sense in the context of the LPs getting screwed over, but not in the context of portfolio companies that they own.
PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it. They use incredibly high leverage and often saddle the company with monstrous debt, then loot the assets to pay the interest and take management fees while doing all this. Red lobster is a great recent example. They sold off all the real estate, then had stores lease it back, turning profitable locations into losers. They often do the same thing with manufacturing, goodwill, brandnames and sales channels.
Think of this like an oil well. If you pump off all the gas, you depressurize the reservoir and can never get the oil. You need to slow your production to get the oil first, but private equity is happy to skim the cream and leave the milk to spoil.
> PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it.
This is simply untrue. A typical PE firm creates a GP fund using LPs money. This GP fund typically does a management buyout (which means 50.1% of more) of several companies using a mix of equity (e.g. GPs capital) and debt (banking lenders). So by every definition of the word, they absolutely own the company.
Looting the companies is accomplished by stacking up debt and then giving themselves the money. Occasionally there are a few variations like looting a pension fund or taking a high quality product and making it horrible and selling that until people notice.
It’s literally their business model, it’s happened thousands of times and is a very clear fixture of the modern American business climate.
If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
It's literally not. It happens to be the business model for a subsection of private equity (usually large cap) and its the one that gets most headlines. There are roughly ~5,000 M&A events per year (often involving PE) and yet you'll hear about 5~10 at most cases where the company gets loaded with debt and stripped of assets. The large plurality of PE groups are buy and hold for 4~7 years and are largely focused on EBITDA expansion.
> If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
No offense, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
Yes. Productivity typically goes up [1]. Its reputation for job cutting is overblown [2], as is its record on price increases [3]. And historically, it's tended to decrease concentration in the industries it operates in. (The conglomerate break-ups of the 1980s were fuelled by new entrants and carve-outs.)
Instead, what I think we have is a category error. Berkshire Hathaway is a private equity shop as is all venture capital [4], and most family businesses of any scale are structured identically to sponsor-owned firms. Meanwhile, LBOs have been unable to shake the private-equity label for decades, unless they're lead by a founder, in which case they're "take private" transactions. In essence, we brand failed alternative asset strategies as private equity ex post facto.
Moreover, transaction size is negatively correlated with returns, particularly for leveraged buyouts. So the biggest private equity deals, which represent a minority of transaction activity, are disproportionately (a) bad and (b) public.
Finally, we get a lot of false conflation of market failures to private equity per se. Private-equity owned hospitals are bad [5]. But I haven't seen great evidence they're worse than other privately-owned hospitals with similar scale. The problem is hospitals probably shouldn't be run for profit or on-locally. But because nobody in particular is defending private equity, that's easier to attack.
The question anyone reading this analysis should ask is: if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from?
The unlock, which these papers don't understand, is the extractive nature of P/E that is hidden.
A few clues:
1. A .5%-1% increase in prices is meaningful (Overall industry prices rise after buyouts, but again the price increase is on average very modest.) Retails margins routinely are measured in fractions of percentage points (bps). As an example, even if overall hospital prices stayed similar, P/E firms have been caught jacking up prices on people who need it most. Research on "Surprise Billing" in emergency rooms spiked immediately after PE firms took over staffing groups. Are you surprised?
2. Equity multiples are "effectively" a form of stealing from retail / pension plans: this is where the real 'theft' happens (if you want to call it that). If you reraterevenue from 6x (private) to 15-20x, someone is now paying 2-3x more per dollar to have that company in society. The key is the P/E OWNERS reap that value, so even if there are no job cuts, the wealth being created aggregates 'money supply' to the owners. This has downstream impacts on inflation.
3. Independent of aggregate effects - local effects are quite devastating. This is not P/E's fault, but closing down plants can kill towns for good. The question here is ownership - a family feels some tie to the community to attempt to help their friends and neighbors. P/E absolutely destroys this tie - the subtle but measurable effects compound.
Finally, even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees.
You're right to say that P/E is just playing the market. That doesn't mean that its impact on society has been good - the entire reason we're in the current political and economic situation we are today are by following the 'laws of the market' which have hollowed out the middle class and created a pretty large affordability crisis despite the world having achieved record levels of wealth.
The transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society, and one of the primary reasons we don't 'build' things anymore - it's just not capitally "efficient"
> if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from?
“During the last 10 years PE on average did not outperform the public markets in aggregate” [1]. (Individual firms overperform, some of them consistently.)
> even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees
Yup! Though nitpick: we often stop calling it PE when it works. VC is PE. So are Berkshire Hathaway and founder-led “take private” transactions.
> transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society
PE is often an exit vehicle for small builders. Particularly in the space that deals with SBA loans.
What are you arguing then? That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing? Hard to argue this is 'good for society!'
> VC returns as an asset class (outside of a handful of firms) have underperformed in the past 20 years. I don't even count it here.
> PE as an exit for small builders
Agree. But again, it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time. The employees - typically - don't. Search can help this (because searchers are usually more dependent on employees) so this is a good example of "micro-PE" being generically better than larger scale PE.
> That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing?
You added a bunch of stuff in front which isn’t substantiated as being an effect of private equity or unique to it.
Most complaints about PE tend to boil down to complaints about, in the extreme, private ownership, and in the specific, leverage or non-local control. Those are legitimate complaints that attach to PE. But not necessarily. And in some cases, not in most cases.
> it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time
Sure. They get the multiple. They can now build more.
Yes, the stuff I added is anecdotal, but pretty well established from my discussions and observations of high level operators and related service providers (Bain, McKinsey, etc.) LMK if you've ever seen a slide deck in their post-acquisition plans that says "Impact on Community."
The PE complaints are mostly unsophisticated from 'the community' but actually have a very reasonable underpinning - as discussed above.
Finally for builders - this is great. Probably the single best application - but again, cost benefit I'm pretty sure it's not only economic drag, but social drag as well.
Again - the asset class has expanded massively. It's due a reckoning - curious how many firms are actually solvent were they required to sell their holdings in market.
IRR comparisons admittedly get a little fuzzy since the lack of liquidity and pegging values is difficult.
You're also correct to say that VC is a subset of PE, technically speaking, colloquially it's not really. If you put VC into the whole mix, then yes the asset class sucks versus the public market. PE is often synonymous with an MBO.
Private equity has rarely done good for investors too.
With the boom of popularity of ETFs in the last decades it has been increasingly hard for active fund managers to justify their costs by investing on public markets where benchmarks are visible and public.
Thus they removed themselves from the benchmark entirely and moved to private equity where there's no benchmark and returns are very hard to gauge.
Analysis shows that:
- The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.
- Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.
- PE performance is extremely murky, as their gains are virtual and whether you exit profitably is heavily dependent on your timing
- The entire sector is ripe with corruption and little regulatory oversight. PEs keep ballooning their holdings valuations by essentially trading companies among themselves. So fund A sells Acme to to fund B at twice the valuation, and will return the favour by buying Foobar at inflated valuation. This all obviously requires access to cheap credit. Many startups are approached by PEs that have already lined up to sell the startup to another PE after few years guaranteeing everybody (from founders to all the PE managers) nice profits, up to the last sucker stuck with the bill.
The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.
"Buyout funds continue to outperform public markets in all regions across time horizons longer than five
years"
> - Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.
Once again, read the report.
> The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.
I sold my business to PE and I profited nicely. So I'm not sure what you're concluding here...
For VC we know there is an edge, but that edge belongs predominantly to the top 4.
I'm concluding that investors thinking that giving their money to a PE fund hoping to have anywhere near the diversification and returns of a simple global market ETF are in for a rude awakening.
Of course you profited nicely, it's who puts the money in the private fund that won't have any chance of beating a very simple global ETF buying your businesses.
And gains in those highly unregulated and illiquid markets (that have insane fees) are what they are: virtual.
In any case I ain't reading a 68 page report, and have no patience for yet another pointless pitch about PE, everything there was to say about PE can be found in this very simple summary by Ben Felix:
I mean, their counter-parties know all of this, but the fact that PE assets don't need to be marked to market on a regular basis can be good for a lot of these investors, as it introduces a delay in the spiral that can otherwise occur with public assets.
Like, if AI collapses, everyone's gonna sell Treasuries to cover losses as they are super liquid (mostly), but the PE assets can pretend that they're still worth whatever, thus reducing margin calls.
PE is generally bad, but their LP's are not entirely stupid and the ability to mark to imagination is worth a bunch of money sometimes.
Private equity are the crows of the economy. They pick off weak / dysfunctional businesses and open space for fresh competition (or for other markets to open up).
As far as I’ve seen that’s as far from the truth as it can be. They in fact consolidate terrible businesses, undercut the good ones and drive them out of the market until only they are left, after which point, they get even worse.
From what I've seen, they take a terrible business and liquify its valuable assets for their investors, freeing up capital to be invested more productively elsewhere in the economy. Of course those investors could take the money and commission a bunch of statues of themselves, but frequently they do something more productive than that.
A lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional. They'll dismantle a business that holds a lot of nostalgic value for people, even though it's long since ceased to be a viable and productive company. But it wasn't their fault that the business was in that situation in the first place! Years of mismanagement and neglect or perhaps disruption from a competitor left the business in zombie-like state. PE came along and put it out of its misery rather than allow it to slowly crumble while depreciating the value of its illiquid assets.
> lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional
Mine specifically stems from PE buying up all but one 24x7 emergency vets in a 20 miles radius from me. All of them were thriving businesses. There is only one remaining non PE ones has its days numbered. After monopolizing the emergency vet market, they shut down a few locations, which previously acted as competition for each other, effectively cementing monopolies in those individual neighborhoods as well. Now, you pay $200 to just get your pet checked out and always have to wait anywhere between 6-8 hours in triage if your pet isn’t literally dying, because they are perpetually understaffed and there are no other options. They also recommend unnecessary tests and treatments, present them as “optional” but refuse to treat your pet if you don’t agree to their “optional” treatment plan.
Lots of businesses have big positive externalities [1]. They provide more benefit to their communities than they take in for themselves. Unfortunately, these sorts of businesses are easy pickings for PE.
Artists are a classic example. They generate huge positive externalities for a community while reaping almost none of the benefits for themselves. Artists get severely exploited by the economy for this!
To counteract this problem we need other ways of addressing the positive externalities. In the case of artists, this usually comes in the form of public (and private) patronage and endowments for the arts.
Man, it's horrible people have such an emotional connection to art and businesses that keep their pets alive. If only we could transform these into an asset that extracted wealth, now that would be great for society! Think of all the externalities!
Sounds like a problem with lack of competition. Would you have been happier if it was a publicly traded company that did it? Amazon health or some such?
What you are describing the best-case scenario. They happen.
What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.
They could do this, but there's not enough targets of this type for the money invested in the sector. They've also proven to not have the advertised & applicable expertise to run companies any more efficiently than current management. Nostalgia had nothing to do with it unless that's one of the company's assets. I've been inside on three PE acquisitions, and 5 sales by PE to new funds. The playbook was the same for them all: predictable, decent cash flow, cut expenses, grow enterprise sales, sell on before long term cracks from lack of strategic investment showed. If anything they accelerated the decline of healthy going concerns, but at each sale the insiders did great.
If only it actually played out that way[0][1][2][3]
Whatever legal and theoretical role they play in the economy does not match the actual, real role they are playing: PE firms are by and large, economic vampires. They have a well documented history of sucking the life out of a sector at the expense of workers and consumers alike
That's not true at all! Funds often look for mature companies with predictable cash flow. They can make returns while also squeezing margins under the illusion of expertise and economies of scale and seek to the next fund for a multiple. They're an alternative to the massive headache of going public and getting a liquidity event, not typically the model for your weak and dysfunctional company.
this would be somewhat arguable as okay except for their introduction into categories like daycare, emergency rooms, drug and alcohol rehab, care homes for the geriatric and disabled, etc. things that probably shouldn’t be profit oriented to begin with yet are and are being snatched up by private equity, worsening outcomes in basically all of them
Except that Americans pay far more for these services than places where they aren't profit oriented. Try again. Reality does not support your assertion.
Nobody in this comment chain was saying it was good for the customers. The GP was saying that they clear out room for new businesses, and if brick-and-mortar-fabric-superstore were still a viable model someone would be doing it.
I am looking for fabric right now and am terribly frustrated not to have anywhere but limited quilting shops available. Online is not an answer, because you can't handle the fabric for weight, exact color, and stretchiness.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
The lack of customer density over time drove out all the fabric stores - medium sized or not.
At-home sewing has been declining since I've been alive, and it was just barely hanging on when I was a kid. The demographics simply cannot support these stores in most locations outside of hyper-dense cities.
Not to mention the folks who shop for fabric tend to be some of the most cost-conscious consumers around. They are more or less the prototype of a customer who will go to a B&M store and then price match on-line,.
I'm honestly surprised even Jo-anne survived as long as it did.
The "clear out room for new business" argument is as absurd as it gets. If you think the landscape is packed to capacity with brick-&-mortar stores to the point that it needs "room for new business," you don't live in the USA.
Consolidation frees up real estate, allowing new businesses to open. Where I live, old supermarkets are now farmers’ markets, trampoline parks, and health clubs, and an old car dealership is a church.
They pick on the weak companies but the basic model is to pick over the corpse and leave someone else holding the bag. Make it look good on the surface, leverage it to the hilt, extract cash and let it die.
You stay in this one. If PE wasn't producing value it would disappear. What, you think people dump money into PE because they want to twirl their villainous moustaches?
Most people would say that extracting wealth and concentrating it into an ever shrinking group of elites is making the world worse. They do this both from the companies you and I might work for, but more importantly from the markets that have no defenses.
This is a simpleminded parody of how a market works. Competition isn't concentrating wealth, it's driving down prices. The value ultimately flows to the consumers.
When PE salvages a failing enterprise, it's increasing the overall value of that enterprise, even if that means selling off parts that still have value. Those parts are made available to others at prices lower than they otherwise would have had to pay.
Wealth concentration flows from impediments to competition. There is no shortage of PE firms competing for these opportunities.
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
This is a bit like asking if public equity has ever done anything good for anyone outside of its investors. It really depends on what is meant by "anything good."
Has any company that has taken venture capital (a variety of private equity) ever done anything good for anyone outside the VCs?
Private equity is more often associated with late stage takeovers and reorganizations than with startups, however. An example might be the privatization and refocus of Dell. Was a refreshed Dell good for its workforce and customers?
I assume you're asking this rhetorically and just want people to affirm how 'evil' private equity is to support the narrative-driven belief you already have?
PE became a favorite journalist boogeyman in the 80s for saddling companies with high interest debt they could never repay or slicing up industrial companies and selling for parts. That's not reality today. A vast majority of private equity buyouts nobody ever hears about or cares about because everything turns out totally fine.
A private equity buyout that makes the company worse off, destroys customer trust, kills employee loyalty, and leaves room for competitors to swoop in is a failed private equity buyout. If that were true in the majority of cases the entire PE model wouldn't work at all.
Here's just a few success stories of companies you've heard of (there's thousands you haven't heard of, so no point in bringing them up).
- Hilton Hotels
- Dunkin Brands
- Beats by Dre
- Dominos Pizza
- Petsmart / Chewy
Businesses that sell to private equity are often businesses that are not doing well or are not long-term sustainable, hence why the owner wants to sell. Think about it logically. If you're running a fantastic business that is profitable, growing, sustainable, with happy employees -- why would you sell?? Or in the case of public companies being taken private, why would anybody take the risk if everything is going wonderfully?
Why is private equity different from any other form of organization? Publicly traded companies are even more addicted to getting revenue. Non-profits like universities may not have shareholders, but somehow the price of tuition keeps skyrocketing even faster than the prices at the dollar stores. And it's not like the religious charities have been pure.
In theory it helps people who have some sort of trade and just want to do that trade, focus on that, while the business experts from the PE firm handle the business side. Running a business is a skill, and people who want to sell some other skill often don't have it as you can't be good at everything.
Are there other ways of addressing that gap, like hiring experts? Sure, but its not like PE is entirely evil.
Keep in mind there is some selection bias here. You only hear about private equity when its being comic book evil. When things work out or its a non scummy PE company, you never hear about it.
If you have a pension, you're an investor in PE. If you live in a country with a sovereign wealth fund, you're a beneficiary of PE. If you're connected to a school with an endowment, a lot of that money ends up in PE funds, and can fund lots of research and student resources.
So ya, I'd agree the PE is rarely good for anyone but the investors, but you'd be surprised how many people are investors without realizing it.
If all of those things never invested a cent in private equity funds that buy up existing companies to turn the screws on their customers and put the money into new business creation instead, they wouldn't be making any less money and the whole world would be better off, including the investors themselves in their role as customers and employees.
I can't think of a single example. It normally means making a company worse whilst relying on existing name recognition to drive sales with the aim of re-selling it before people realise how bad the company has begun.
So I work in commercial real estate, obviously a large private equity influenced industry. I've worked in REPE and in other capacities.
There's degrees of PE. Some good, fine, and some worse.
Take real estate development. It's probably one of the suckiest businesses to be in. I know 3 developers who have committed suicide because when things go wrong, your entire life collapses (you put up all your assets in order to obtain construction loans). The litigation, brain damage, and risks are enormous. Increasingly, the payoff is awful (due to worsening legislation and NIMBYism and worse market condiditions)
However, private equity in development I think is a good thing. When there are investors willing to put this money at risk, we get much needed construction of housing (see Austin, TX where rents are falling off a cliff due to over building).
Now look at Los Angeles, which new permits are literally almost non-existent because LA is one of the most hostile places for developers. You can't make money in LA, so there's no capital available.
Then you end up with "affordable" housing developers adding the only supply at $600-900k/unit costs vs the market rate developer at $300-600k/unit.
----
On the other hand, "value add" private equity is much more suspicious. It's more cut throat, easier to end up in crony capitalist situations by operating with a "cut expenses, provide less, make big bucks" model. The people in this world are the kind of guys who have never done anything hard with their hands other than gotten a sore thumb from pounding too hard on their keyboards to adjust their excel model ("Mr. The Model is Always Right") too hard all night long.
This is how we end up with old properties who get flipped 4x each being sold with "upside the seller was too stupid to take advantage of" and ending up in situations where tenants get priced out due to private equity seeking infinite growing returns. Oh and by the way, every previous owner did "lipstick on the pig" jobs because why not try to save costs and make your levered IRR 16% instead of 12%? You cannot show that kind of return when you promised 18%... then it'll make it harder to fundraise your next deal!
This isn't to say that "value add" is a dirty business. We certainly need to balance the incentive to modernize and renovate properties. An d developers overbuilding isn't always a good thing.
So its nuanced. I think people need to fairly give credit that there are both good and bad. The capital efficiency is real and produces real world outcomes since there is a strong financial incentive at the end of the door.
But financial incentives sometimes bump up to issues causing harm in real life, which need to be recognized and called out.
Not yet. Sometimes employees if they get second bite of the big apple. PE do well in capital-intensive sectors. I'm not sure if their playbook fits the real needs of dollar stores. Instead of focusing on things like debt and aggressive cost cuts, most customers just want fair prices, stocked shelves, clean stores, friendly cashiers and basic respect—things that PE firms often ignore. In DFW, I was surprised to see 1-2 person dollar stores!
That's a good point. Private Equity is a fairly broad umbrella term that encompasses a variety of investment strategies and business models.
The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter. These "investors" are a blight on society, this activity should be criminalized, they should be in prison.
But there are a lot of well-meaning investors who do great things for society that also get stuck with the same label.
Just like crows! People hate crows even though they play a valuable role in ecosystems.
I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them.
I would love to hear some counterexamples though. Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
> Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
You have way too much (unneeded) limiting qualifications. In Netherlands PE have bought loads of companies, then put the acquisition price as a loan on the balance sheet. Plus then sold the assets, made the company then lease those assets. Then those companies often went bankrupt as the leasing prices increased crazily.
> I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society.
The companies I've cited weren't "extremely unproductive and inefficient". Businesses can be profitable and healthy without all the qualifications you think they need.
Weren't they losing money for years on all-you-can-eat seafood specials [1]?
It's not uncommon in the fast food business to be breaking even or losing money on all aspects of the business while the true value of the company, its real estate portfolio, steadily grows. The fact that investors decided they wanted to cash out should be a surprise to no one.
> The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter.
And this type of PE represents a very small minority of what is actually considered "Private Equity". The vast majority of PE deals are about growth. This small minority of asset stripping PE groups gets the most headlines though.
> Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.
Dollar Tree and Dollar General are publicly traded.
So Family Dollar might be the result of PE tactics, but the other two aren't, and Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar because they saw it as under-performing.
It's actually sort of weird Dollar Tree couldn't make it work. I know the dollar stores all have somewhat different businesses, but you'd think that Dollar Tree could have either turned Family Dollar around or knew it was selling a loser (see the market for lemons) to PE.
And this is exactly why I only shop at Costco. While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.
Buying in bulk is about having the ability to both afford next week’s food this week and have the means to store it. Not to mention the annual subscription.
Responding to a comment about dollar stores preying on the poor with, “that’s why I shop at Costco” is… a choice.
The fact that the strategic wedge with which a successful, relatively socially-positive business manages to sustain itself isn't universally accessible doesn't negate its value.
The Venn diagram between people who shop at dollar stores and people who shop at Costco isn't empty.
> the ability to both afford next week’s food this week
At minimum that's everyone on a normal paycheck, paid every two weeks. There are situations where someone couldn't get together a few days' pay at once, but that's a tiny fraction of situations.
And the means to store most food is a two foot square of space in a room somewhere. And then most of the rest fits in the empty fridge space you already have.
And there are deals there that can be useful for your wallet right away. This isn't something where you have to put up a ton of money for months before you benefit.
The biggest issue is probably that costco isn't easy to get to.
This is true, but a valuable - and damning - observation that this variation in business model, that seems to be both decent and profitable, is so rare
Time to go and acquire necessary food stuff is not a luxury in any reasonable framing. What is the alternative, eating drive-thru every day or having Instacart deliver overpriced groceries?
I believe eating food from street vendors was the usual way for paupers until quite recently. Recall that it was common to rent a bed for a few hours and share it with someone who worked different shifts.
Indeed. And I say this as Costco member. There are lot of factors that make Costco memberships work. And a lot of people won't be able to make much benefit out of Costco membership.
I say this as someone who admires their business model and how they treat customers & employees: your typical Costco experience is drive to the suburbs, spend $500 and load up your car with nice to have food products and discretionary purchases. Poorer people cannot do any of these things.
They don't require everyone to own a car. At the very least, they can run an efficient delivery service. And there's got to be a way to make a 3 hour rental or single taxi drive once a month much cheaper than owning a car.
>While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.
This doesn't make any sense. Costco makes a profit on the goods sold as well. They have every incentive to sell you as much stuff as possible. That's why they also engage in the usual retail tactics to increase sales, like having the essentials all the way in the back of the store, and putting the high margin items (electronics and jewelry) in the front. They might practice a more cuddlier form of capitalism than dollar general, but they're still a for profit retail business.
I see you're not terribly familiar with Costco. Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco and they keep markups on items at no more than 14% over cost (15% for Kirkland brand).
So yes, Costco does make most of its profit by ensuring customers are happy and continue to renew their memberships every year.
>Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco
This is financially illiterate because you're mixing revenue ("membership fees") with profit ("net operating income"). While it might be tempting to assume that membership fees is pure profit for them, it's not, because people only buy memberships because they're useful for something (ie. shopping at their stores). Therefore you can't strip that out from the other costs associated with operating a chain of warehouses.
It’s kind of a meme; Costco’s profits are almost exactly the same as their total revenue from membership fees, which leads people to think that the warehouses run at zero margin and the fees are their only profit source. The fees certainly give them room to run the sales at extremely low margins (though large grocers like Kroger only have something like 3% margins), but it wouldn’t take a huge shift in purchasing patterns to change this coincidence. If all the people who don’t use their membership that much dropped them and those who use them were all large-scale buyers, they would have to increase their prices just to give themselves a bit of cushion.
>It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.
You think dollar general is making $37.9B (in 2023) of annual revenue from one-off customers? Unless you're operating a tourist trap, or some sort of business that people only need a few times in their lifetimes (eg. real estate agents), most businesses rely on repeat customers.
Dollar stores around here pop up in small towns, killing off any locally-owned competition, and are far enough away from the big chains to mean they can charge quite a bit more while offering terrible service.
No, I think they have other advantages that are less attractive to me.
I have money to buy in bulk, care about quality, and am willing to make longer trips to stock up. The membership is trivial relative to annual groceries.
I think think the target market for dollar stores is the opposite
Oh gee aren't you cute. Costco's entire cost of doing business are covered purely by their sale of goods. The memberships are pure icing on the cake. It's not wrong to look at it this way.
The sad thing is, people in rural areas that depend on places like Dollar General, and are getting fleeced blame everyone but republicans and they are usually in red areas
I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!
You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)
For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
Being in a shopping rich area, I have some luxury of choosing what I get where. DG is a good option for a small list of items, about ½% of my shopping.
But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
Having moved from a shopping rich environment of some 30 years to a very rural setting, I was innately trained to hate on Dollar General by my 15 years on HN. In reality, it’s a trade off. Nothing more, nothing less. Whereas before you might have fallen back on a country-store with a small kitchen and minor staples (eggs, cheese, milk) next to the RedBull most folks now have a wider variety of options at a price point comparable to or better than that filling station. All the better, DG has rolled out their “Market” concept with fresh options as well.
At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
> But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
In much of the rural US, 15mi away is having your good shopping close by. A lot of areas make due with their "best shopping option" being well more than 15mi away.
Yes 15 miles for good shopping sounds pretty nice. I'd say I've got it fairly good for being rural - only 23 miles to the nearest Walmart. That town isn't really great shopping though.
The concept of "small convenience store near me" isn't the problem. The problem is that these stores are actively engaging in outright fraud. People who shop there are absolutely getting fleeced regardless of how much gas they burn getting to the store that's regularly ripping them off.
Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.
If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.
Your article lists a few instances of target in an area failing at rates like 9% or 2.67%. The Guardian article shows dollar stores all over the place caught thousands of times and getting error rates like 76% 68% and 58%. One dollar store in Utah was caught cheating their customers in 28 inspections in a row! Maybe the News & Observer could have dug deeper into the Targets in your area and found violations of a similar scale, but they didn't, so from the information we have these are extremely different circumstances.
If Target (or whatever the hell a Sheetz is) were ripping off their customers to the same extent that these dollar stores have been doing it then they should also face meaningful consequences for that.
> They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model.
Like every other retail business not targeting the top 5%.
And Dollar Tree and Dollar General are both publicly listed companies, not private equity.
Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar for $1B 10 years after buying it for $8.5B, a pretty big loss. Dollar Tree’s market cap is $25B, so a pretty negligible part of the national dollar store business is “private equity”.
Costco's revenue comes from their membership fees and their ability to strongarm suppliers to give them favorable terms (eg. Costco is one of the largest alcohol importers in the US and tends to strongarm LVMH).
I love Costco (I practically grew up at Costco as a kid), but their ICP is not the kind of person who shops at Dollar General or is on SNAP - it's very much targeted at the 50th percentile income bracket and above [0].
And this is why PE has taken over the dollar market segment - because it's a trash business that no one else wants to service over the long term. PE is basically the last resort if a business cannot raise capital from traditional avenues, and leadership and investors want to exit. For y'all graybeards think of "Sam Vimes Boots theory".
Mine Safety Disclosures did a great overview on Costco's operating model a couple years ago [1].
Costco purposefully targets the upper middle class to nearly the point of exclusion of everyone else. By charging membership fees, product selection, and the bulk pricing.
They could care less about the bottom 50% of the market.
Here's how shitty of a business person I am: I had no idea that the poor were a "market" you could prey upon.
Somehow I thought that if I presented a business plan that began, "Our target audience are those living paycheck to paycheck…" that I would be quickly shown the door.
Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.
The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
You’d have to explain why you believe that. Just because someone in poverty can afford to purchase items in the store, doesn’t mean it’s good value, i.e. it’s not necessarily providing relief from poverty. In fact, it’s the opposite. See e.g. “How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices”:
Interesting. The Netherlands is no class society so rich or poor nobody has any goddamn shame to stand in line at the Action checkout if there's a good sale to be had.
Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot. Strange country.
I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldi (in the US). There’s plenty of Teslas, BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot (although late model Hondas, Toyotas and Kias are probably the most prevalent). Turns out people of all income brackets like saving money.
Americans used to claim this too. It’s invariably false. It just means that the wealthiest people do a better job of concealing, or not advertising, how vast the wealth discrepancy between them and the average person is.
> Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot
The least wealthy person on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth could afford 10,000 high-end BMWs and still be extremely wealthy, far too wealthy to have any interest in lining up at Aldi’s for a sale.
Makes me wonder if the right way to help lower classes is to give them some space (association, platform) to meet and solve issues on their own terms so nobody tries to leech from them.
Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine.
How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses.
So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio.
And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.
Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this.
"When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.
If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should
be FREE.
If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item."
Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.
Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for. You couldn't just walk out of the store with the items. You'd need to either:
1. Buy the items and sue.
2. Take the items without paying, likely get the police called on you, and defend yourself in criminal and civil court.
3. Point at the sign, which is posted at every register, and ask for your discount. If they say no you ask for the manager. I've done this several times, and never had an issue (but sometimes it takes a little while).
Theoretically there is a third option, stay in the store near the cash register and call the police to come deal with it on the spot before the purchase. The problem is that they probably won't bother coming, and if they do, they won't come quickly enough to make it worth waiting for them given the amount of money at stake.
Edit: Yeah, I did say before the purchase, but I should have said after the purchase when they pay the legally correct price but the store accuses them of shoplifting and tries to detain them. And I know it's often infeasibly hard to pay the legally correct price from a logistical perspective without the cashier's cooperator, especially if you want to pay with a card. It is clearly possible to put at least the right amount of cash on the counter, ask for the change, and attempt to leave if they refuse, but that doesn't guarantee ever getting the change. Anyway, I did list this option as (purely) theoretical and not as actually practical.
Just refuse the price and walk out, closing the checkout lane while they put everything back on the shelf. Announce loudly what you are doing. Take some friends to do it in other checkout lanes
In a lot of places in the US, the lower of the shelf price and the scanner price is by law the most they can demand, at least for retail sales to consumers. Attempts to stop the customer from leaving after having paid the legally appropriate amount would be criminal acts by the store, no?
I did call it a theoretical option and not a practical option. Although they might be a little more sympathetic to someone who is white, in a business suit, has a photo of the shelf price on their phone, can confirm that a surveillance camera captured them paying the shelf price, and is lucky enough to either get a cop who knows about the local price accuracy law or can point the cop to a visible posted sign about the law in the store.
Not to mention that cops only have powers to arrest/issue tickets, not to adjudicate disputes. This isn't Judge Dredd where cops can mete out judgements as they see fit. That's the whole reason why we have courts and judges.
It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail. Many places legislate that the lower of shelf or scanner price be the maximum price charged.
>It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
> When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need.
Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.
> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.
There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.
Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.
> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.
I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
>There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor)
Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
> Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.
> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.
> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.
But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.
To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.
(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)
Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer to leave with their purchase after the customer pays the legally mandated maximum price which is often the lower of shelf and scanner price, yes. That's not going to be a high enforcement priority for the police, but it's absolutely a crime if the store does that.
>Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer [...]
Realistically no store is going chase after the customer for that, but that doesn't mean the average shopper is going to risk arrest/banned (for what the store essentially sees as shoplifting) to send a $2 message over the price difference. And all of this assumes your novel legal theory is actually correct.
Your original idea of "paying the marked (lower) price, walking away, even if the cashier corrected you with the higher price" certainly is novel. Otherwise can you link any sort of judicial ruling or even a random lawyer that agrees with you?Otherwise this looks suspiciously similar to all the spurious legal theories that sovereign citizens have, about how they don't need a drivers license because they're "traveling" or whatever.
Similar laws exist at the state level in NY, in other NY counties, and in several other states and subdivisions of other states across the country.
In that case, the higher charge is clearly illegal (no novel theory needed), so standard contract law theory could consider the terms of the buyer's offer to purchase to be the terms of the invitation to treat in the absence of legal contrary terms offered at checkout. I guess it's possible that the court would say that the store never agreed to sell the item at all by demanding an illegal price instead of being considered to have accepted the buyer's offer on the posted terms, but there's only so much tolerance a judge would have for that kind of defense by the store - after all, it's very likely that the customer would have an unjust enrichment claim against the store for the amount of the overcharge if they were to pay the illegal higher price, and that wouldn't be true if the illegal contract term were valid.
The precise answer may vary by state based on judicial precedents about illegal terms in contractual counteroffers following an offer to buy made pursuant to an invitation to treat.
None of this is practical for almost any chain dollar store overpricing victim to pursue, but I am just talking theoretically here.
If you walk out and it goes to court you will surely lose. You may have started with the right to get it for nothing but you cannot realize that right by force. Self-help is almost always illegal in any case of disagreement between parties.
> Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for.
Here in Europe, we have consumer protection agencies. Get wronged? Shoot them off an email and they'll take care of it. And overcharging at the cash register? That gets handled by the responsible authorities. Again, call them, tell them what happened and it can get real messy real fast.
I was having trouble getting Verizon to unlock an iPhone that had been purchased (not financed) from Best Buy and that had been on Verizon's network for more than two years. Verizon support said only BB could unlock it[^1]. I thought that was poppycock. I filled out a form on the FCC's web site just before midnight. By 8 AM, the FCC had forwarded the complaint to Verizon. By 9 AM Verizon executive relations called me. 30 minutes later the phone was unlocked.
Which is all to say, for some things, the US also has consumer protection and it's great when it works.
[^1]: Apparently only Apple sells unlocked iPhones. iPhones purchased at other retailers carrier-lock themselves at activation. At least on Verizon they're supposed to automatically unlock after 60 days. When that doesn't happen, you get stuck in Verizon's mindless customer support swamp[^2,^3].
Yeah, I've had a similar experience with a phone company trying to hold a number hostage. Yes, the bill was unpaid, but I was not the one liable. (My phone on a company account, the company was going under.) Letter to the regulators, very promptly fixed.
Not only that, but they post a sign about this at every register. (That must be required.) So you can point to the sign. I think a typical store manager would comply. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.
Yup. My local Star Market was pretty bad about this, so I started paying close attention to prices on the shelf and at the register. Pretty soon I was taking home free items every shopping trip. (I also reported them to Inspectional Services when aisle scanners were broken or prices were particularly egregiously missing or wrong.)
Some of the cashiers had to have it explained to them with much pointing to the sign that hangs on every register; others knew the drill and called a manager over right away.
After about 6 months they started shaping up. Maybe the store manager got fed up, or maybe corporate stopped having them skimp on sticker hygiene.
From the article:
> In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing, given appropriate incentive and enforcement. In particular I noticed that this really varies from store to store, even in the same chain.
> ...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing
It's both true. Given that a typical store can have thousands of SKUs displayed, mistakes will _always_ happen once in a while. A forgotten price tag, an incorrect sale price, etc.
But at the same time, stores are more than capable of having a system to _fix_ these issues as soon as they are detected. It doesn't even take much, just a way for a cashier to flag an inconsistent price for someone at the back office.
So this means I would get the app-only sale price, without using the app?
While doing some research into state retail pricing laws a few years ago, I discovered how tough Massachusetts is, being one of the last holdouts mandating ticketing on all items, and only relenting in exchange for price scanners every so many aisles. Living in Pennsylvania and annoyed by stores tying their best prices to their apps, I fancifully emailed Elizabeth Warren, asking if she'd prod a friend in state government to consider a legislative end run around apps. I had no idea such a law really existed. "First in the nation" I expect. Wonder how long it's been around?
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.
Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar.
Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)
It was investigated, the issue is that the fines are smaller than the profit. I would personally want to see things like this considered fraud and that it can result in prison sentences for executives and other people invovled in the decision making.
Ya the problem needs to be a fine the first time, second time it’s fraud. Allow for honest mistakes. Punish for clearly defrauding customers. We really need jail time for execs making these decisions but that rarely happens.
I ask because I've never invested in a company that wasn't very profitable. I'm trying to find out besides intense insider information why someone would. (I'm not VC clearly, just a retail investor.)
All the above. Plus it is absurdly simple to manipulate profit up or down.
For example, as an owner, I can be paid a bonus, or not. Crumbs, I can be paid a salary or not. If I want profits high, I simply take a low salary and no bonus. Or vice versa if I want profits low.
But that's the tip of the iceberg. Buying an asset this year, depreciated over the next 5, means higher profit this year, and 4 years of lower profit.
Marketing expenses this year, benefits next year, and so on. Drop the head count to juice profits for a couple years, raise head count to drop it, and do on.
Profits are the easiest thing to manipulate and hence the worst metric for fines. Which is why you see Europe use Revenue (not profit) as the measure for some fines.
Yep, not to mention what you can do with complex conglomerates. For example, one should take a look at the intra-company eliminations that the giant pay-viders do (e.g. UnitedHealthGroup, owner of insurer/payer UnitedHealth and healthcare provider Optum)
Insurers are margin-capped, but wouldn't you know it once you own a PBM and the providers, you can make revenue, holdings, pricing power, and market share rise arbitrarily while never producing a profit beyond the cap.
If there’s a paper trail showing they authorized it, and the total amount of fraud is enough for felony charges (a few thousand bucks, I think), then yeah, throw their asses in prison, and make them refund the money they had the business steal out of their personal funds.
I’m all for limited liability corporations, but if there is a smoking gun that shows you intentionally engaged in criminal activity, that should pierce the liability shield.
Do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specifically said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says? Chances are, in the world of computers and automation, mis-pricing just happens. Its a chance we all take as consumers. You just have to be mindful when shopping.
For all intents and purposes “mispricing” doesn’t just happen widely. This is a policy problem with the stores. The difference between an accident and fraud is intent - it’s pretty clear there’s systemic intent here.
> do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specially said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says
Yes. I 100% believe that a policy from management of a retail chain owned by PE would say “charge the till price not the sticker price”, and also separately “our policy is to ensure all prices are consistent by doing a price audit of every stickered item once per 6 months”. All that does is allegedly ensure they’re not ripping people off two days a year.
Why, yes, I actually do. Just like BMW execs specifically instructed engineers to cheat at emissions testing.
And last time I checked, you don't get to just say "oopsie woopsies, I only accidentally committed fraud of a mass scale exclusively in a way that benefits me for a prolonged period of time that would obviously show up on books and intentionally hid it until caught" and get out of punishment.
If I break the law, I get arrested. Or am I allowed to "accidentally" try to carry out a new PC from Best Buy several times in a row?
I don't know about you, but shopping at major grocery stores I have rarely been mischarged and I check my receipts/final price pretty religiously. If Dollar Tree consistently overcharges people then there should be an investigation, discovery and jail time if they willingly enable fraud. And given that this entire thread is about how they frequently overcharge people I think it matters.
If it’s being done systematically, and, er, well, it certainly sounds like there’s a case to be answered there, then, well, why not, after a proper trial?
Like, imagine if your bank randomly took a few percent extra off each transaction. Someone would get in a lot of trouble for that, and at a certain point “we’re not doing fraud, we’re just staggeringly incompetent” won’t cut it.
Why is incarceration suddenly not an appropriate possible punishment for theft if it is done by someone in a suit. These are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars being swindled from poor people. Not a single 5 cent mistake as you try to make it out to be.
OK, and the next time you defraud your employer by $0.05 (take a longer break then needed, arrive late to work, etc) then you should spend the rest of your days in prison. Fair is fair, right?
You're really missing the point here. If I defrauded a million companies for $0.05 yeah throw me in prison. If Dollar Tree defrauded a single customer of $0.05 that's very different than doing it millions of times.
Some people say it's trickery, but when I apply the razor I find pricing errors more likely to be the result of stupidity than of malice.
Having worked in retail myself, I understand that some days there just isn't time to get it all done. A debt of unfinished tasks can accumulate. It happens. Sometimes old prices get left up. (I think the stupidity is on the part of management more than it is the employees, but it's still more stupid than it is malicious.)
---
Dollar General got into the thick of it with the Ohio Attorney General a couple of years ago[1] over this issue: The prices on the shelf didn't always match the prices at the register. Stores were closed[2] while they updated their price tags to match reality.
And as part of the settlement with the Ohio AG: Nowadays, when I go into a Dollar General and Red Baron pizzas are on the shelf for $5 and they ring up at $7.65, they're required to honor the posted price of $5 when I bring this up to them.
(That last bit really should be enshrined in law instead of the footnotes of a legal settlement with a single entity, but alas: It just isn't that way in Ohio.)
I would like to think incompetence as well, but when the problem is this widespread, IMHO it does point to a corporate issue...even if that's simply leaving too many incompetent managers in charge. IMHO if you're the manager and the part-time teenager didn't finish updating all the shelf pricing, then it's on you to finish before going home. But today too many people just don't give a damn.
My first job was in retail as well, going back to the days before scanners when every item item was ticketed individually. When something goes on sale you ticket it again, then tear off the sale price stub when the sale ends. Repeat as needed. Maybe that could be a suitable punishment, too? Force stores to abandon shelf pricing for a period of time until it hurts enough that they get their act in order?
Hanlon's Razor is not relevant with large amounts of money at stake. in fact the complete opposite is the best approach: The more money that's involved, the more you should suspect malice until it has been conclusively ruled out.
As a company seeking to maximize profit, why would you fix this problem? It seems optimal to say "it's out of our control" -- you get to overcharge customers, and you have a reasonable explanation if a lawsuit comes.
I would be curious to see how often it's the other way around, e.g. they undercharge a customer.
I prefer to think that people (including those who run corporations at the level of -- you know -- price tags) are broadly more incompetent than they are malicious, dishonest, replete scumbags who would sooner stab a person in the back and take their wallet than give them the time of day.
You're applying that razor incorrectly. These dollar stores are run with a skeleton crew, where it's impossible for the workers to keep the store in order, or to update the prices on the shelves. The prices of items at the register is managed centrally. They ensure resources exist to increase prices at the register and not on the shelves, and that's misleading and fraudulent.
This isn't a pricing error. They should change their practices to require prices be updated on the shelves, and for that to be verified, prior to the prices at the register applying (and this should be required by law).
It's funny that it's criminal when someone shoplifts from a dollar store, but knowingly showing one price and charging a higher price isn't a crime. We need to start treating corporate theft as crimes, rather than as a cost of business.
This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter.
You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.
> everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process
Nobody agrees on that. TFA follows "a state government inspector" whose effectiveness is hampered solely by a "North Carolina law" which "caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection." That law [1] doesn't exist outside North Carolina.
This is the first time I'm reading about this. We have a dollar store in my town. I'm curious to replicate this experiment myself and send the results into the local newspaper if the discrepancy is real.
> this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process.
Yeah it does. This is specifically the sort of thing that the FTC is in charge of addressing.
That is ultimately controlled by who the president is. There is some funding problems with these enforcement agencies that forces them to pick and chose their battles. However, you'd be naive to think that there isn't a significant difference from how Lina Khan ran things and how Andrew Ferguson runs things.
Keep in mind, this is also a state thing. I live on the NC/SC/GA border so I view news for all three daily.
I routinely see this type of crime heavily policed and reported on in NC. Whereas my entire life is in coastal SC and never once in my life saw this repeated on or enforced.
In Massachusetts it's policed and enforced but the maximum fine per inspection is $5000 so it doesn't actually do anything (and it only applies to food anyway and stores are also allowed to exempt a fairly large number of items). https://www.mass.gov/info-details/accurate-scanning-and-pric...
Their attorney general could also sue them, as was done in several states mentioned- resulting in much larger settlements. Only the fines by the dept of weights and measures are limited.
Paying 10 to 20 cents more for an item can still be a better deal than traveling further away to a larger store. The mis-pricing is completely unacceptable, though.
But because these stores exist, they lead to grocery stores no longer existing, because they eat the majority of the profit from grocery stores. This forces people to shop at the dollar stores because it's the only thing nearby. The dollar store model increases prices, reduces consumer choice, and makes us less healthy.
I haven't seen that happen, maybe it does in some places.
In my hometown, we had a grocery, but it closed in the earl 90s. They didn't get another on until the lat 00s. It was open a few years, had bare shelves most of the time and convenience store level prices when they did have something. In the late 10s, a Dollar General opened... so far, it has remained open, has much better prices than the previous attempts, and is generally much better stocked. The town hasn't grown in that time. But Dollar General is existing where no one had managed to survive before.
On particular items, yes. As a whole, no. They have a lot of loss leaders, then rely on being generally overpriced to make that up. Grocery stores also rely on this, but at a larger scale, and when their higher margins dry up, they go out of business.
Dollar stores target grocery stores margin products, to drive them out of business.
It's worse than that. In many cases the dollar stores now get skus of items made for them that are "cheaper" than a sku in Walmart but for a more expensive unit price than Walmart as they shrink the product.
I am a POS system developer. Such errors can occur in the systems I develop, but they are unintentional—often caused by price data synchronization issues. I am actively working to resolve them.
> Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)
They could of course show the actual prices instead of tricking customers?
If the margins are so low nobody else will be significantly cheaper anyway.
It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores.
Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart's U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam's Clubs as of 2024).
Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of "food deserts," which are often rural communities located more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce—a gap often created when a community is too small to maintain a supermarket or attract a retailer like Walmart.
I am not an attorney, but given that Dollar General and Family Dollar are highly likely to serve a much larger percentage of SNAP-eligible customers, isn't there a far more serious FEDERAL crime being perpetrated here of retailer abuse and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamp fraud? That is, if the SNAP customers have no other means of purchasing food (living in a food desert), and the retailer is intentionally charging more for food items, isn't the retailer committing fraud against the US government? Federal criminal prosecution of SNAP violations could result in fines up to $250,00 and imprisonment up to 20 years. More significant consequences than otherwise being reported here.
So you are saying that Dollar Generals tend to open in areas where there isn't already a store that sells anything like food or otherwise? So would people in that "food desert" be better off without Dollar General opening a store? Because the only way I see that is feasible is if you only compare the reality of this situation to the fantasy ideal that isn't reality at all.
Given how important these stores are to many communities, any attempts at fixing the situation have to be very carefully considered so as to not negatively impact those communities too much. At least in cities and places with other options, if those stores shut down, it isn't nearly as significant as small towns that rely on dollar stores.
23% of items are rung up at a higher amount at the register than what it says on the shelf, yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem.
In other words, regulatory capture at its finest, over the backs of the poorest in the country.
It’s not regulatory capture unless the regulatory body itself is controlled by shady grocers. This is just garden variety insufficient regulation. Although if they inspected every day it would probably still be profitable for the state.
While I agree, for the most part this comes under state regulations. Especially red states are always trying to cut taxes and the government at the cost of not having enough inspectors.
> yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection
So, have every agent in the state inspect them. Fine 5k. Immediately inspect again, different goods. Fine another 5k. Keep doing it opening hours.
Treat them like an inspection money piñata until they fix their ways. State gets a big pile of money to do better, and massive fines at 5k a pop for a few weeks punish the company and their bottom line.
Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?
A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either.
I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not.
Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior.
If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.
> Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?
Because the current country's idea of fines against egregious business practices mainly amounts to a 5% fine of the profit they defrauded those against.
It turns a punatative action into a "cost of doing business". Look at right now with Dollar General - 25% of their goods are priced higher at register, defrauding people. And what can be done? Leave. Because many states are completely ineffectual in strongly attacking this.
And although North Carolina caps inspection fines to $5k, how many times were they even inspected? And were any fines even submitted?
I mean, more like someone elected and really high up in the state government calls the inspection office and tells them to stop, or everyone at the inspection office will get fired, since said elected person cares far more about getting reelected then the people that they should be representing.
Depending on how much independence the inspectors have they could probably turn a heck of a profit per inspector (thus being able to argue their continued existence to the legislature).
Could an inspector manage two per day? If you figure the full cost of each inspector is $150,000/year but dedicated ones could do 8 inspections at $5k each per week, there's well over $1 million/year per inspector (assuming not all inspections would be the full fine, there's travel costs per inspector, inspectors would have to spend some office/court time, etc. that would bring it down from the potential maximum of ~$1,800,000 each factoring in vacation and holidays).
Even Republicans could get behind it! "We're reducing the direct budget of the department, but authorizing it to hire additional inspectors in order to bring in additional revenue that can be utilized to bring the budget to or above its current levels." It's a cost reduction measure!
There's precedent for this; the Federal False Claims Act lets you sue on behalf of the government if you spot someone defrauding a federal program (in this case, perhaps if they take SNAP?). If your suit is succesful you get 15%-30% of the recovery for your troubles. There are "private attorney general" rules on the books at a state level too. I think it's kind of elegant, we can all see that inspections are understaffed, but non-compliance is often not that hard to spot and document. I'd propost that employees should have some whistleblower protection (and relief from NDAs and such) for building dossiers with supporting documentation of criminal fraud.
These provision are called "qui tam" from "qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur", or “who sues in this matter both for the king and for himself.”
I think they suit well with the US's history of bounty hunting, much like class action suits.
What this calls for is an Amazon-style optimization of inspections. Given X inspectors and Y locations, what is the most optimal routing to optimize for coverage and penalty collection?
In Australian supermarkets when the price of the item is wrong you get the item for free. (At least it was like that in 2011). Cashiers would run into the store to go fix the price tag.
Amazon-style optimization? You mean they send three different inspectors to the same store on the same day, each scanning one third of the necessary items for the audit?
Offtopic, but I made the mistake once of buying groceries from Amazon and they instead sold me a package of cheddar cheese that was completely blue from mold. Some "quality" inspections they got going don't bode well for public-private "partnerships" that outsource essential government functions to a corrupt third-party that's likely to be owned by a craptastic private equity hedge fund.
The error rate is nonzero, but in my experience Amazon will make it right with little friction. A short chat is almost always enough, no labyrinthine phone trees or escalations.
Last time I had to contact Amazon the chat option was no longer anywhere to be found. I gave up and actually called. They were nice enough on the phone but it was a good reminder of how much Amazon’s customer service has degraded.
Yes, but all problems with tainted food are not as visually obvious as mold. After some bad surprises, I've decided to never eat anything I ordered from Amazon.
I don't know NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice there where prices marked are a customer relations issue rather than a legally-binding offer?
To attain change, enough people have to:
1. Correctly identify the source of their misery, because it ain't [insert scapegoats].
2. Find others who agree with them.
3. Make a plan for effective countering of 1.
4. Use intestinal fortitude and endure temporary setbacks to achieve 3. to overcome 1.
5. Prevent 1. from ever happening again structurally, culturally, and through vigilant participation.
The 0th problem is the political operating system is captured by criminals and power has centralized grotesquely in ways that defeat the fundamental function of separation of powers. All elected officials corrupted by lobbyist bribes need to face accountability and have a code of ethics and integrity, because continuing down this path is the road to ruin.
I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence.
So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.
If another customer changed the price tag, that would be in the same category as if a person unaffiliated with the store said "I'll give you a deal on this item for $10", then pocketed the money while you walked out with the (still not yours) item. This doesn't really have any bearing on whether the owner of a store putting up a sign with a specific price for a specific item that a customer can directly take possession of constitutes a binding offer.
Sure, but it's in the same category as the owner putting up a sign by mistake, or omitting to update a sign by mistake. Or more realistically, an employee of the owner putting up a sign even though the owner had instructed him to put up a different sign.
No, in this case the shop is legitimately offering an item for sale, and then forgetting to change the price they are offering it at. It's quite disingenuous for a shop to put up signs, and then act like those numbers aren't legally binding, while the real prices are hidden away in a database somewhere. If they want to have their database be the authoritative copy pricing information, then they can just not put up price signs to begin with.
Sure, but the point of those laws is to diminish the ability for merchants to obscure prices, as a deliberate public policy goal.
Such places are likely to have more proactive regulations against price discrepancies well, rather than common law "freedom".
Still I can imagine a few ways for a store to post prices without being in the territory of forming binding offers - keep stock only accessible to employees, post obnoxious signs everywhere stating that the prices are for informational purposes and that no offer is implied, require membership for entry with appropriate terms, etc.
Or rather than continuing to run the complexity treadmill trying to escape regulation, stores can just accept that they're bound by laws that were settled quite some time ago, and that their business includes making offers to sell items.
> NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice [...] rather than a legally-binding offer?
Are there any common-law jurisdictions in the world where having products on sale in a supermarket is not generally considered invitation to treat but as an offer to sell?
The invitation to treat is the store inviting potential customers to treat (engage in commerce) with the store by submitting an offer to buy the displayed items at the listed price, which they usually do by bringing the items to the register or (for more specialized purchases) telling a store employee that they want to buy the item. When the buyer makes the offer, the cashier accepts the offer on behalf of the store by ringing up the purchase, and the buyer performs their end of the contract by paying the price, thereby contractually gaining ownership of their purchase.
One reason it works this way is that treating displayed items as an offer to sell would leave it unclear to whom the offer to sell would be made. Clearly each item on display can only be sold to one of the many shoppers who sees it, so they can't all be offered the sale. There are several other reasons too, like different customers being offered different terms of sale based on loyalty program membership, promotions, student or senior discounts, etc.
As the article says, the term in various US jurisdictions may be slightly different, like invitation to bargain, but the basic concept is the same. (I'm ignoring Louisiana entirely, which has a completely different legal tradition not derived from English common law.)
It comes from a UK case, Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain vs Boots Cash Chemist (southern division) from memory.
If the price on the shelf were an offer to sell, then you would be contractually obliged to buy everything you picked up. The offer comes instead from when you pass it to the cashier, which is why I'm saying for the third time on this thread, if you don't like that price walk out and leave the goods at the checkout...see if they find it more fun to put all your goods back, or put the correct prices on the shelf! If a group of people did this at every till the store would be effectively closed.
Seems like it actually creates an incentive to go big or go home. If you're already going to be busted and hit with the maximum fine, might as well have even larger mispricings, so you come out ahead after the fine is taken into account.
Regulatory capture is when a large company encourages stronger regulations that small competitors cannot afford to satisfy. Here the issue is regulation that is too weak, not too strong.
No, that’s just one form of regulatory capture. If this legislation is a result of lobbying from retailers opposing imposing meaningful fines, particularly if the state of things before its adoption was that penalties from failed inspections were often higher, then this is regulatory capture.
> But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem
This is a huge problem with all manner of laws in the US. We are not willing to insist that fees be limited only by their ability to prevent the prohibited behavior. Fines should continually escalate, if necessary until the offender is bankrupted, at which point their assets are taken. If Dollar Tree keeps doing this, the fines should eventually reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even the billions. Such penalties should also apply to company executives and board members who are responsible for the company's overall conduct.
In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:
- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.
- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.
- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.
- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.
- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.
In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…
Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.
Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?
Regulators take tip offs and if one gets through, the enforcement action is usually pretty fast and strong.
They also like doing this. The ACCC makes a huge deal out of parading their latest conquest in the media.
Has its faults, the ACCCs dealings with telcos are especially terrible.
I still have friends at an Applecare provider based in oz, and they had a big one where as a settlement with the ACCC over trying to have it both ways with consumer law, they agreed to provide repairs or replacements for like a decade of wrongfully denied hardware issues. Hushed it right up. It was in lieu of a public apology from memory. But my friends spent weeks calling back old customers, chasing new contact details etc, to try and get them all free replacements.
I guess it might be a cultural thing? The shelf price is the binding price here in practice. If you get to the register at the supermarket and the price is higher, you can just let them know and they will send someone to check the price and match it.
Yes, seems to be partly regulation and enforcement partly cultural in a voluntary code of conduct that tends towards benefit to the consumer. For example,
[All the major grocery retailers] are signatories to the voluntary code of practice for computerised checkout systems in supermarkets. Generally, this means that if an item is scanned at the checkout at a higher price than it says on the shelf or as advertised, a customer is entitled to receive the first item free and all multiples of the same item at the lower price.
When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day.
It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync.
Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.
Yeah, that "computer error" explanation is bullshit, probably rooted in a combination of CYA and narcissism.
When I worked in retail, we only had one database of pricing. The shelf tag and sign printers, the registers, the whatevers -- they all used that same database. If a shelf tag was printed at the same instant that an item was rung up, then they'd have had the same exact price.
There's mechanism for the prices to deviate.
(And yeah, pricing errors still happen at least because people are people. We make mistakes. We forget shit. We can even convince ourselves that we did a thing even if we didn't. We err. Even if we're absolutely honest with ourselves and others, we can run out of fucks to give. It's all part of our condition.
But of course: When a price was posted wrong then we fixed it once it was brought to our attention. The customer got the price that was posted, and the posting was changed.
For my own purposes, I had a habit of pulling the incorrect price tags and taking them with me back to the register; I'd just give them to whatever manager when they would show up with the key that was required for precise price adjustments and get back to doing whatever it is that my primary job was at the moment...which, if I were handling a register, meant something other than printing shelf tags.)
While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved.
You can dislike it, but they've evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren't.
People wanting bank branches and grocery stores and brunch spots here clearly have never lived or worked in many of these areas. The reality of theft, low spend, and employees - though not universal - is hard to fathom if you're not trying to 'run' the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.
I have overall had good experiences with Dollar General, but mis-pricing items like this is completely unacceptable. This article is very damaging to their brand to me. Even though I haven't experienced it myself.
Keep in mind this happens in all industries to varying degrees and causes.
I once worked as a cashier at “The Fresh Market” chain, a higher end, higher income store. We had this issue all day every day. I couldn’t go a shift without having to call over the manager for two or three price corrections. The root-cause was our incompetent stoner stock-boy would leave up discounted sale signs up for days and even weeks after the time had passed. Despite his bad work ethic he worked there for years because help was just that hard to come by. Nothing ultimately malicious by corporate but the end result looks suspicious as can be.
I understand that- the key is "varying degrees". This article documents several cases across multiple states that go well beyond reasonable. I've learned to be careful to look at the dates on sale tags.
Another thing many grocery chains do is list a price that is only for folks who sign up for the stores tracking program, rather than the price that folk who don't want to jump through whoops and sing the song and dance pay. (They put that price in the fine print).
Dollar General and their ilk are behemoths compared to the shops that might have served these areas before they rolled in. It's possible they're the only game in town because they engaged in dumping or other dirty/illegal tactics to drive out established businesses.
I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.
The reality is a small business owner does not have the time or wherewithal to negotiate large contracts across hundreds or thousands of brands. They may nail SKU's and quantities better than a Wal-Mart or Dollar General, but at the price of higher costs and lower selection.
You don't really see large scale backlash in communities against these stores for this reason - buying branded at a reasonable price point is foundational for a good quality of life in modern society.
Most people vote with their feet, and are happy with the tradeoff.
Even if they accurately charged shelf prices, these places are still a ripoff targeting the vulnerable. The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.
While that can be bad, sometimes you come out ahead after accounting for spoilage, time, and travel.
Sometimes I pay higher unit prices at a dollar store intentionally because they offer smaller package sizes not offered elsewhere and I only need the smaller amount. I could get a much better unit price at another store but would waste the rest of the product.
If I'm going for a multi-day stay somewhere and I don't want to deal with annoying mini bottles of hotel soap, I'll just pop into a Dollar Whatsit for a small bottle of something suitable at my destination.
I lived for an entire year out of just Dollar General and Dollar Tree. In some rough areas they are the only stores where you can buy groceries, so they have very clear monopolies. There are good value products, and like everything these days you have to use their apps to get the best offers. Also, the Dollar General app lets you check the price of everything before you take it to the counter. They regularly have items marked up at 1 cent.
I've been able to find good deals on some things at Dollar Tree. Usually the good deals were a smaller quantity of a normal-quality brand-name item. I mostly avoid the substandard quality items. But even sometimes substandard is OK if, say, you want to make your political demonstration sign on white foamcore (much cheaper than the art supply store, and you don't care if it's smaller, thinner, or outgassing) rather than on an Amazon shipping box.
There was a Family Dollar across from a large public housing project here, where I also went looking for deals, but the shelf prices looked like a convenience store. I didn't find out whether they were fraudulently charging even more at the register like this article describes. (I hope it closed because the residents knew there was an affordable Market Basket a 20-30 minute walk away, over the city line and train tracks, and they were able to get there and find the time for it.)
That's great, and a mix of all kinds of signs is to great effect. (People from all sorts of demographics using whatever means they can to be heard.)
Sometimes the sign-makers are artistically inclined, and may have access to better materials.
The most memorable example was at the political demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations) leading up to the Massachusetts constitutional convention that legalized gay marriage. For the State House one I photographed (learning photojournalism on the side), the anti-gay-marriage people were mostly bused in, including a pair of angry-looking old nuns in black full habit, and handed out the same ugly stock sign. (There's an obvious joke that they couldn't find a graphic designer who was sympathetic to the anti-gay cause.) Separated from them, across a street was a huge counter-protest, with an ocean of all sorts of creative, colorful, and positive handmaid signs, held by generally good-natured and thoughtful looking people.
Saying it only targets the vulnerable because of high unit prices is like saying the local gas station is a rip off that only targets the vulnerable because prices are higher.
I lived in a city that’s in North Metro Atlanta (Johns Creek) where the median household income was $160K. There was a Dollar General right by a Publix. People still went in the Dollar General for little things where the small packages that you could buy was feature and not a bug.
We still stop by the dollar store for snacks sometimes because it is convenient just to get things to pack for a flight. It’s especially popular for tourists in Orlando where I live
There is one near Naples in Florida I go to often just for the insane drink discounts compared to the Publix or Wawa or the Walmart Neighborhood Market thing across the street.
Have you ever been to a dollar store? Its much cheaper for the same items than a regular grocery store. Also not everyone needs a Costco sized tub of mayo. You test it yourself go by a standard sized candy bar at safeway/alberstons and then at a dollar store. Bottle of coke. Birthday card. Better yet compare the cost spices. Try to buy bay leaves at regular grocery store for under $5.
Candy bars and soda sure whatever. Look at essentials. The dollar store near me charges $1.99 for 8oz of Tide, the Albertsons a single block further charges $9.99 for 84oz, the dollar store is over double the cost. It's the same story with soap, cleaning products, etc. A tiny container for cheap feels like a deal if you can't do the math, but it's not. Feel free to "test it yourself."
I'm lucky in that I have a real grocery store nearby to compare to. If you live in a food desert where these big chains have driven out all competition you wouldn't have a choice.
It's not only the math but access to cash. Families living paycheck-to-paycheck struggle to make long-term investments. Paying 5x for larger quantities may pay off in the long-term, but if you're struggling to make ends meet and stretch dollars today, it might be overwhelming.
Dollar stores are crowding out grocery stores in areas that only have the clientele to support one grocery store. They sell only higher margin, long shelf-life shit food, whereas real grocery stores have to carry produce which cuts into margins considerably cause it goes bad. So it's easier for them to stay open. And they create food deserts there. They are a fucking scourge for small towns.
Sounds like the grocery stores were not serving their customer base well if they couldn’t compete with “overpriced” dollar stores.
Carrying cost of produce does not add up. If produce is going bad at that spoilage rate the store management fucked up and didn’t order the correct amount of product for the location. You can’t wish your way into a product mix.
Nothing was stopping grocery stores from identifying this need. Pretending your customer base is more affluent than it is sounds like a quick way to go out of business to me.
Explain why rural customers prefer the dollar store to the grocery store? Are they just stupid and don't know what's best for themselves?
Perhaps the rural grocers are not carrying the appropriate product mix for their current (new?) customer base, and are overvaluing customer service?
I don't like it - but I also spend time in rural communities and see why these places beat the local grocers. They offer better value for the dollar. Often they are indeed cheaper on a unit cost basis, much less overall per transaction.
It's sort of like folks screeching about "food deserts" in urban communities I've lived in, thus enacting laws forcing fresh produce be carried by the local convenience stores. That produce simply rotted on the shelves since - surprise! - the local business owners knew their customer base better than a bunch of do-gooder ivory tower academics did.
You can make some strong cases for Walmart putting Main Street rural America out of business using predatory pricing schemes and the like. It's a lot more difficult for dollar stores.
They do not offer better "value on the dollar" they offer units that individually cost less but over a year of buying what you need to survive you pay more. That's how items are generally priced; smaller packages, higher unit price (as in, price per ounce).
You shouldn't say "screeching" if you want to be taken seriously, it makes you sound shallow and dismissive, incapable of understanding how your narrow outlook is not applicable in some situations.
Please, take even the most basic efforts to understand what people are talking about here instead of forcing me to shove information down your throat like you haven't learned how to use an internet search yet. You don't need my help, and nothing I can say will be more convincing than your own personal research.
> They do not offer better "value on the dollar" they offer units that individually cost less but over a year of buying what you need to survive you pay more. That's how items are generally priced; smaller packages, higher unit price (as in, price per ounce).
Does the consumer not have all of the information available to them to make the comparison of the per unit cost between a dollar general and a local grocery?
I don't see anything that says they are "fucking" them. I see plenty that they are out competing them. People get to choose to go to whatever grocery store they like.
Perhaps you you are motivated to believe that it's just "markets" at play. Monopolies and extortionate power don't exist, anyone who wins deserves to win, etc. Here is the top search result when I search for "dollar stores killing grocery stores" in Kagi.
> When dollar store chains open, it almost always cuts into the sales of local businesses. At first glance, it might seem like this is simply the nature of competition. But dollar stores use their hefty market muscle to make it virtually impossible for other businesses to successfully compete. With plenty of cash from shareholders and institutional investors, chain dollar stores have the resources to lose money indefinitely in a community until their competitors have folded.
> For many businesses, losing even a small percentage of sales can put the business at risk of failure. There are many types of businesses whose products overlap with chain dollar stores and that are therefore vulnerable, including hardware, small appliances, toys, reading materials, greeting cards, and health and beauty supplies. With dollar stores averaging around 10,000 square feet in size and sales of around $260/square foot, a typical Dollar General captures over $2 million in sales every year — and those sales are likely coming out of the cash registers of businesses already there.1
> This is an enormous problem for grocery stores in particular, which have razor-thin profit margins. Cutting into a grocery store’s sales even a small bit can endanger its survival. Food is what customers buy most often in dollar stores,2 making dollar stores a clear threat to grocery store survival or creation. And grocery stores’ profit margins are higher on items other than fresh produce — things like processed, prepackaged food and snacks — which is the bulk of the food that dollar stores sell. Peeling off just enough sales of packaged food can send a grocery store into the red.
> There are many examples of grocery stores that closed when a dollar store opened nearby...
I just replied to another comment. I lived in the most exclusive part of Atlanta for awhile where there was a Dollar Store right next to the Publix right next door to our $2500/month apartment.
Source that they are replacing grocery stores? Dollar stores are closing and not expanding
. 99 cents stores went bankrupt, rest have been closing hundreds of stores.
Also dollar stores carry produce just grocery at least largest ones do like dollar general. They are designed to compete against grocery stores and wallmart’s neighborhood markets.
There have been a few articles about this over the past couple of years, usually in reference to one study or another. Here's one that references a USDA study:
There's variations in dollar stores, and in packaging, and deals, and everything else.
Let's play with Tide, and with Kroger and Dollar General just because those are the two retailers that are near to me. We'll do biggest and smallest, and start with the smallest.
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The smallest bottle of original Tide that the Dollar General near me has is 34 ounces for $6.00: $0.1765 per ounce.
The Kroger near me has a similar, but lesser, bottle as their smallest offering: 32 ounce bottles for $5.99: $0.1872 per ounce.
Dollar General wins on smallest.
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The biggest bottle of Tide at Dollar General is 115 ounces; regularly, $16.95 ($0.147 per ounce). On sale for $15.95 ($0.139 per ounce). With a $4-off digital coupon, $11.95 ($0.104 per ounce).
At Kroger: 132 ounces for $19.99 ($0.151 per ounce). (With a $5-off-of-$25 digital coupon if I feel like giving Proctor & Gamble even more of my money in one transaction.)
Dollar General also wins at biggest. They win at regular price, and today they also win at sale price.
shrug
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Convenience also has a cost. For instance: I ran out of cat food on Christmas Day. Everything nearby was closed except for a Circle K, so I walked over there to see what they had. And they had cat food (of course they did). I bought the smallest container of Purina dry cat food I've ever seen for ~$9.
That was a lot of money for such a small amount of cat food, but I was happy to pay it. They had the right product in the right place at the right time. (And most importantly, the cat was happy.)
So these big chains have drive out all competition. I assume you are referring to the big chain dollar stores. So how did they drive out all competition? Did they do it by charging more for items or by charging less for items? I think I am failing to see any sort of logic in the argument here.
Spices might be the most universal ripoff anywhere in the US. You can get it so much cheaper either at ethnic stores, generic plastic bags at certain grocery stores in the ethnic aisles, or restaurant supply stores for spices that don’t have a short shelf life.
It’s so bizarre to me. At some point someone needs to do an in-depth expose on how this spice monopoly happened.
> The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.
The problem is, so is material cost and handling effort. Say, a 2 liter bottle of soda compared to 10x 200 mL. Same amount of soda, but more handling required for stocking, inventory management (aka, make sure there is no soda expiring on the shelf) and finally scanning it over the cash register, and more packaging material.
Larger units of anything will always be cheaper than small units.
This was not always the case. 30 years ago the customer base for bulk co-op places were lower-middle class/poor folks who had a decent amount of financial acumen. You'd go there with your own containers and buy staples by the pound. Or special order that 50lb bag of oats or flour for 1/4th the per-lb price of the local grocery store.
They slowly morphed into bougie health nut/conspiracy hippie stores during my lifetime. Closest thing I've found to what I remember them being are food service stores which tend to require a business tax ID to buy from.
Davis Co-op c. 2000 was legit cheap and good. I lived across the street from it for some time.
I can do without the "health/wellness" aisle of mystery fluid bottles almost entirely. Whole Paycheck Foods and a lot of independent grocers also have this fad and it's depressing that borderline Miracle Mineral Solution nonsense is allowed through under-regulated "supplement" exceptions. More power to those who benefit from ever-so-slightly-helpful / placebo vitamins-supplements but it seems like mostly from snake oil of a century ago.
Anyhow, there are/were more decent grocers. Like Lundari's 30 years ago in the SF Bay Area. The status quo isn't the only available option.
If you live in Seattle and you find items are rung up for the wrong price, I highly recommend reporting it to the city. I did this once and was shocked that they promptly sent someone out to check the store and issue a citation. The inspector who emailed me was very polite and professional as well. It's rare to have something like this taken seriously and to have the enforcement properly funded.
Unfortunately I don't remember which form I filled out but I believe it was this one
- in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there.
- in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions.
so... what's the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?
This article is about something subtly different than overcharging: it's about consumers believing that they're paying one amount (the list/sticker price), and being charged a different amount (typically higher in the company's favor) at checkout.
In my experience, this doesn't really happen with bodegas: they might be overpriced in the "this is a bad deal for milk" sense, but they don't misrepresent their sticker prices to any degree that I've ever experienced.
(But also, I don't think bodegas do categorically overcharge in NYC. I think they're about the same as grocery stores, i.e. there's a large amount of internal variation in pricing because people generally don't want to make multiple bodega pit stops just to save $2.00 on eggs.)
Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible.
Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.
There was no competition in many places dollar stores operate. They moved into those places specifically because they were underserved by larger retailers.
Once upon a time I lived near the Prague city centre, and if the intent of such a corner shop is to rip off tourists and one-time visitors, the locals don't mind - at least as long as cheaper alternatives off the most notorious areas exist and are usable for them (Lidl etc.)
Quite to the contrary, the locals are sometimes happy to have such overcharged options at hand, for example if they are throwing a party and find out that they are short on vodka+cigs, and it is 1 am and all the regular shops are closed.
Because in NYC I pass by tens of the bodegas on the way to work and I can shop at any one of them. I can also shop at Aldi’s, Trader Joe’s, Costco, what have you.
You said it well yourself - “begrudgingly”. With so many options and price points, I don’t have to begrudgingly shop at bodegas. I do it happily if it serves my goal of getting a single can of Coke. If I want to get a whole stack of them, I’d happily get them at Costco. Options are great when you have them.
Minimum wage in NY is $15.50, in Kansas it's $7.25. The overcharging in rural areas is not adjusted downward for lower wages. But I wouldn't shop at a bodega and don't find it virtuous there either.
Probably „only store that’s in my vicinity“ in rural areas vs. „if that bodega sucks, I go to another“. So one is a necessity which overcharges, the other a convenience which overcharges.
Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased.
Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they're too overworked to keep up. Whatever the case, you just learn to keep an eye on the checkout, or alternately ask for a price check on it before the cashier starts ringing merch. The second approach is more polite and the cashiers appreciate that.
The same thing commonly happens at the grocery store, and other stores I shop at too. It's not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say "This is on sale now, but it's not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount." And they will give me a better price than what I was expecting to pay. They have to manually adjust the price to give that discount to me a lot of times. Grocery cashiers just scan as quickly as they can and don't check.
So while all the yuppies who never step into dollar stores are acting hyperoffended about this story, I think the story is unfairly targeting the dollar stores. Apparently saving money gives some people here the "ick" but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut 'em some slack.
I shop at Family Dollar sometimes, and also Dollar General and (shock, horror) even Dollar Tree.
I shop at these places because I am very cheap, and these places are also often (not always, but often) very cheap and the selection is usually pretty good, for the size.
And before someone else blames math for my perception: I can math. I can also remember prices between the shelf and/or the website and the register, and between different stores. (I've been cheap for a very long time. One cannot succeed at being cheap without honing these kinds of skills.)
The shelves at these places aren't beautifully-faced. The lighting is shit -- lowest-bidder, lacking design coherence, and either too bright or too dim. The music, if it exists, is usually a Bluetooth speaker playing from an employee's phone or a single pair of thrift store speakers from a 1990s Aiwa mini system [sometimes, even fancy-style with one on each side of the building] with some local radio station or other playing. There's usually large delivery carts sitting around in the already-narrow aisles with fresh inventory that the 1 or 2 employees who might be present sometimes get time to stock a bit of.
And that's... that's all just fine.
I don't want to pay for beautifully-faced shelves, good lighting, and a professionally-installed overhead PA system that plays professionally-programmed musical selections in a professional manner. I don't want to pay for shelves that are magically stocked in the wee hours of the morning by a dedicated team of professional stockpeople.
Like, seriously: I'm not that proud. My goal is to save money; shopping for inexpensive canned beans and a gallon of milk from some factory farm does not have to be an enriching, transcendent experience.
So when I have need to buy stuff, and there's a Family Dollar across the street from the office and Dollar General is around the corner from my house? I cheerfully stop in and give them my money.
The employees are almost unilaterally very polite and helpful. They know the entire store's products very well, even if the price tags aren't always up-to-date. It's a good, quick, cheap place to shop for good cheap stuff.
(I see comments here that read like "I only shop at Whole Foods. I went to an Aldi once and turned right around and walked out" and all I can think of are callously demeaning phrases like "You blithering, sheltered, classist snob. It may be possible for a person to bring even less relevancy to this discussion, but I cannot presently imagine how that would be possible."
But I usually try to keep that kind of phrasing to myself.)
I experienced this first hand maybe a year ago when I randomly walked into a dollar general to get something, their prices often times are pretty close to the "regular" versions of the product, but packaged specifically for dollar stores.
I get why people shop at them in rural places because that's the only shop within 10-20 miles but in cities it makes no sense. Had prices been 20-30% cheaper but in a smaller size it would still be a ripoff but an understandable one, but often times I saw products that were priced just 3-5% below their standard counterparts while giving you maybe 30%-50% of the product.
Every store has some stuff that is overpriced compared to peers and some stuff that is underpriced. Dollar stores make their money more on drastic understaffing (leading to the issue in the article) and national scale than they do on being a consistently worse value. They have the cheapest freeze dried strawberries by weight you can get anywhere other than making them yourself.
Same. My city has a Walmart, Publix, Food Lion, Kroger, and Aldi. Yet they keep building dollar stores, I think there's now 5 within 10 miles of my house. They all seem to do decent traffic, which baffles me. The stores are a mess, items disheveled everywhere, and rare to see more than a single person working. Really depressing places, I cannot figure out their appeal.
People still think they’re getting. Deal. They’ll figure it out eventually. Same with goodwill selling clothes for at or above new prices, eventually the knowledge propagates.
The main thing keeping the local dollar stores alive is the death of Party City as far as I can tell.
> North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
> Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
> Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.
> Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.
> The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.
This comment section is full of allegations that dollar stores are predatory, yet when I look up their operating margins they are super low (4% for Dollar General, for example).
Yeah, queue the HN fake outrage about big companies and their C-Suite who are billionaires on the backs of the little people. So predictable.
Fact is, Dollar General and similar stores provide a real value to people who live in rural areas. Yes, their prices may be higher for some goods, but that is the price you pay for the convenience they provide. People are free to drive another 20mins to a WalMart or another store to save $0.50 for the same can of corn or loaf of bred. And, people who are really on a budget actually scrutinize the register receipts to make sure they are paying the price listed on the shelf. They can immediately bring up the discrepancy to the staff.
It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k.
Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.
ROI on payday loans for lenders is typically very high and their main issue is usually regulation that limits the volume they can transact. ROI on dollar stores is very low because the margin is low, costs are high, and inventory turns is relatively low. For example, Dollar General's inventory turns are half Walmart, that means that to continue operating they need to charge higher prices (the margin).
Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years. If you take out industries with intellectual IP and the secular shift in margin due to taxation changes, ROI across industries is relatively stable...because margins don't matter. What is a good indicator of customers exploitation is if ROI is high. For dollar stores, shareholders are getting exploited, not customers (look at DG/DLTR share price, this is with a secular upturn in multiples, if you take out unit growth which is inherently limited the financial performance is non-existent).
> Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years.
This is wrong because quarterly reporting normalizes for expenses in same period
The part you have quoted is a written explanation of the DuPont formula. It is nothing to do with reporting periods, it is just a calculation of the return from a business. A high-margin business is not, necessarily, a high-return business (and in the context of the discussion above, high returns is a sign of exploitation...dollar stores are low returns, the shareholders are being exploited not customers).
LOL it just seems that no business can do right here. So these low margin stores should just shutter and close up shop because they are somehow still "screwing poor people"? Would you commend them if their business just infinitely ran at a loss or gave people cash at the register instead of charging them anything for the items that they want?
Wait, why? I get the emotional resonance of this, but unless their marketing spend is egregious I just don’t know how you can argue their whole business model is predatory.
Publix in the southeast US will give you anything that rings up wrong for free. I shopped there for 20+ years and only remember getting a handful of things free.
I'm in Toronto and I've never had anything ring up incorrectly at Wal-Mart. I can't recall ever having anything ring up incorrectly anywhere else, either. There have maybe been a couple of times where a sale price didn't apply to all the SKUs I thought it did.
As someone who typically only enters a Whole Foods or a Home Depot for her retail experiences, the one time I entered a Dollar General, I was struck by how depressing it felt. I would never go back into one. Yes, I know how out of touch this sounds.
I think that's deliberate: you walk into a dollar store and think "they aren't spending a dime on the shopping experience, so they must be passing that dime onto me."
Yes, yes of course. The leftover smell of homeless urine by the front door isn't real; it is only carefully calculated scents piped in by corporate dollar store yuppies to have you believe this is an authentic experience.
I have a very, very convenient Walmart including a pharmacy so I do go in from time to time especially for standardized purchases. But I don't really like it. And I poked my head into an adjacent Aldi once and retreated. Otherwise not really worth the headache.
I shop at Walmart and Costco. The customers at the Costco appear much better off, but they seem much more arrogant and inconsiderate. They leave carts in the middle of the aisle, talk on phones with their families blocking the way, and so forth. Same behavior in the parking lots. Maybe it's because Costco is always packed. The shoppers at the Walmart definitely look less well off. They are much more respectful and considerate of others. I like shopping at the Walmart more.
The shoppers at costco vary drastically by location. If you have more than one warehouse reasonably close by, it may be worth your while to try them all.
Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements.
“At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.”
Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
They make it sound like isolated incidents. Someone should keep following up on statements like that until they are fixed, or refer them to a DA. No?
> “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
I don’t knnow about 'expected', but 'not plausible' is up to the company to get their shit together. My spouse works in retail - nobody has time on the shop floor to change label prices all day.
Some prices change by a few cents, and then a week later, they change again.
If annyone complains, they get the scan-at-the-register price, and then the particular area in question gets a very quick emergency team sent in to re-do all the physical tags.
> Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin
All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold.
This implies that an error rate of perhaps 2% would be legal. I haven't checked, but I guess Europe has something similar even though I'm quite certain that retailers have to sell things at the posted price if there's a mistake.
Part of the problem seems to be that the maximum fine (at least in the state in the article) is "too low", so retailers don't have an incentive to keep price tags correct since they profit from the error and even if they're fined it's still better (economically) for them to charge more than the price tag. I wonder how much lobbying has happened to keep fines low ...
The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that.
If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store.
But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.
I worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience.
Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.
And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.
> Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.
If corporate had to wait until every store signaled "all clear" on paper tags, most retail businesses would go bankrupt in record time. The margins are not fat enough to run things this slowly.
Their returns (margins are irrelevant) are usually lower than grocery stores. Large retailers will turn over their inventory tens of times a year, dollar stores won't so the returns are typically lower.
For some reason, left-wing journalists turn into law of one price zealots when confronted with this issue. The reality is that these locations have low-volume and stores everywhere are relatively expensive to run now. For some reason, journalists get angry at the company rather than people who control how much it costs stores to operate. I mean local governments in the US had no problem accepting Dollar General's sales tax from their poor constituents shrug probably more than the corporation is making from the store.
I live in the UK and there is a store like this, Co-Op. The Guardian finds it easier to blame evil foreign corporations because the Co-Op has much higher prices but is a non-profit so the narrative of the evil corporation crumbles.
Not charging the best-advertised price is dishonest. It might also be in customers' best interest if the cost of keeping consistent price data on low-margin items costs more than whatever the inconsistency is. Or the answer might be that dollar stores sell too wide of a variety too cheaply on too low-margin product to play supermarket-style pricing games effectively.
Both groups have the same profit margin (golf score). One group is achieving it by deceive customers (cheating at golf) while the other is achieving it without doing that (being good at golf).
The company owning both Dollar General and the sister real estate would report consolidated income.
If you're saying there's a secret arm's length relationship between a dollar store chain and a real estate holding, structured just to trick the public into thinking low cost retail is low margin, I'm afraid that is not true.
Dollar stores are the new neighborhood "outlet stores" compared to outlet stores of yesteryear (remote locations for not much/any savings). They're actually glorified convenience stores while also not being proper substitutes for grocery stores in food deserts. Most US grocery stores are also now rip-offs like convenience stores were, while big box stores are somewhat savings stores now... f'kin' turbo inflation.
I don't know about the feasibility of government grocery stores, but I'm pretty sure the entire food supply chain would benefit from massively changing to the employee-/customer-/supplier-owned co-op model and get megacorps and private equity out of the normalized deviancy of predatory money extraction for essential goods and services.
I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the "Scanner law") - if you're overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the 'bonus' is optional, but if they don't do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees).
An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they've completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.
If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn't be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue.
Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.
If the goal is to fix student grades instead of just documenting it, the points counted off need to escalate with repeated incorrect answers. The first incorrect answer can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth quiz still shows the same incorrect answers, the grade shouldn't be the same C; it should decline sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the points from letting it continue.
”Dollar General argued that when customers create accounts – for example, by downloading the company’s mobile app – they agree to use arbitration to resolve disputes and forfeit the right to file class-action suits. The judge agreed.”
I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price.
Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing.
Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.
If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft. Not even if it was a mistake on the part of some employee (and it's not the employee's fault either, by the way)
The store is under no legal obligation to sell it to you, just like you're not obligated to buy it for that price. Depending on the situation, that might be false advertising they could get in trouble for, and obviously you're not committing a crime if you don't know the real price, but if someone says "oops, that's a mistake", and you take it anyway and give less money, that is theft in most states.
True. They can keep you out of the store. Under some circumstances they can indeed keep you out of the store. However it's still the US and the reasons for keeping people out of stores are restricted, and we've all learned in high school why.
But, once inside, an offer is made through the pricetag and accepted the sale is final. Before payment, before ... The whole point of price tags is making an offer. So if you are inside the store, take the good, and accept the sale at the price on the tag, obviously a court will rule both sides are in agreement about the sale and price at that point (NOT at the cash register) and that's that.
Additionally, money legislation makes cash the universal cop-out. You can always choose to settle a debt through cash. And that debt is what's on the price tag, the offer that was accepted, nothing else. In other words, the cashier and the manager, hell the CEO comes down and refuses? Give them cash and walk out with the goods. Perfectly legal thing to do. The sale was already final, and this settles the debt. Done and done.
This is why messing with price tags in stores is such a serious offense.
This goes pretty far in law. You can actually go to the IRS, ask to pay with cash money, and they'll let you pay your tax bill cash. Cash is the universal cop-out.
>If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft.
Source? What happens if somebody stuck a $1 sticker on a ps5? Does that mean you can walk out paying $1 for it, even if the cashier corrects you? What if it's not something absurd but a plausible good deal, like $50 off?
“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””
Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.
When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date.
It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.
That's because those stickers constitute an offer of sale for a given price. If a customer comes in, takes the item, throws down the cash to an employee and leaves, that's a 100% bone fide legal sale.
That's also why messing with price stickers is a crime.
> When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).
It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.
Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.
I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.
An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...
I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils
down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that.
There's another kind of store that's in a similar situation: thrift stores and nearly all
of them have also decided this problem is too hard. Lots of items are marked with just colors based roughly around their estimated value and the store changes the price/color mapping occasionally.
When we are in an environment of 3% annual inflation the day to day price movements will overwhelm the drift of inflation and be basically random in terms of increases vs decreases.
It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it.
Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)
The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn't immediately abusing them.
That’s about ads, not sticker price on the shelf, and about a lack of obligation to sell at that price. It does not say that it’s alright to lie and charge a different price at the register.
> A display of goods for sale in a shop window or within a shop is an invitation to treat, as in the Boots case, a leading case concerning supermarkets. The shop owner is thus not obliged to sell the goods, even if signage such as "special offer" accompanies the display. […] If a shop mistakenly displays an item for sale at a very low price it is not obliged to sell it for that amount.
Boots was a UK court case. The Wikipedia article you linked has a note at the top that it mainly refers to British law.
In the US, local laws generally side with the consumer and legally entitle you to the displayed price. There are also federal laws from the FTC act against deceptive pricing.
>Michigan requires a bonus of 10 times the overcharge amount.
New Jersey’s Retail Pricing Laws mandate that most retail stores clearly mark the total selling price on most items offered for sale. Retailers must also verify the accuracy of their checkout scanners and may face fines of $50-$100 per violation for noncompliance.
Connecticut law requires stores to charge the lowest of the advertised, posted, or labeled price for an item. Customers who are overcharged are entitled to a refund of the overcharge or $20, whichever is greater
"The people that would have the ability to push back"...
And they can. Just bring it up to the cashier or managers attention, and voila, they adjust the price. Please let me know if you have had a different experience.
There's no "just". It takes resources to be scanning your receipt for discrepancies and/or running your own tally. And there are a few examples in the article referencing stores refusing to adjust prices, or of people noticing on their receipt that they were defrauded and the store refusing to reimburse them.
Resources to read the receipt? Are you saying poor people can't do math? Honestly, how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors? If you are really on a tight budget, I guarantee you will be looking over your receipt.
I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
> how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors [compared to your memory of the exact prices of everything you just bought]
> I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about. Both of those things are straightforwardly doing extra work using your own time and resources. I generally spot check my receipts and do a rough mental tally, but if I had to turn that paranoia to max because some store was continually trying to defraud me, then I would likely stop going there.
If a store refused to adjust a fraudulent charge or honor an offered price, then I would keep escalating the issue and not back down. This too requires resources of having the time to argue, reading as someone who will not simply be browbeaten, plus deescalation and being able to communicate clearly if they call the police, etc.
The hard part is talking to the cashier and waiting for a manager, potentially having to argue with both, and looking like a cheapskate.
If you've ever shopped at dollar stores they are often understaffed with a long line, no self-checkout, and a single cashier on duty if at all. If you argue about pricing you will hold everyone up in line, maybe get dirty looks and possibly wait an hour for someone with the authority to come and clear it up. Another person in this thread also mentioned that they got screamed at and chased out of the store for "causing a problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451
I have been to the Dollar Store (and similar) many times and have never witnessed anyone getting yelled at for saying, "Hey, I think this was a mistake. Can you correct it, please?" (or any other place I shop - especially the grocery stores). We tend to have very positive experiences when pointing out pricing errors. My mother-in-law made it a point to review the receipts ever time we went to the grocery store. No big deal. As other have said, sometimes you get +10% of your money back and other times you get it for free.
Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.
I mean, that person actually got yelled at and had to leave the store. Some are more sensitive than others and just the fear of an unpleasant interaction is enough for some people. I've let small discrepancies slide just because the staff looked overworked and I didn't want to make them stop what they're doing, run down to the aisle and check prices and get their supervisor. For most I think it's just a time thing. It isn't worth a couple dollars to commit to an unpredictable amount of time going back and forth and waiting for a manager. I salute those lions like your MIL who stand their ground and fight back but there are also many, maybe most, who are just in a hurry or want to avoid confrontation.
One note about asking for a refund/price adjustment. Occasionally the store workers forget to pull the sale prices off the shelf when the sale is over. In these situations, the manager/workers are appreciative since they can pull the sticker that was left on by accident. Just my experience...
From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
This is poor behavior by the stores. The solution will be conversion to eink shelf labels that sync like registers do. Realistically, the fines will not be increased to the point where increasing store staffing and training is cheaper. I don’t know where Dollar General is in this process, but many other c-stores and grocery stores have implemented digital labels. Digital labels come with the temptation to experiment with more dynamic pricing which would also make it harder to shop on a budget. However, high staffing or fines also increases prices. I wish we had better retail in more of the United States, especially needier areas.
I am convinced the wallmarts in Canada are doing dynamic with the eink price tags. I was in the same location twice in a week to pick up snacks for a gathering and the price of chips were 50% more on the Friday vs earlier in the week.
I believe they may in the US, too. Anecdotally, I bought all of the Dr Thunder Zero Sugar at one store twice, and they bumped it about 20% for a few weeks after that. They didn’t change the other generic sodas’ prices.
For people to vote with their wallet, there has to be an alternative. In "dead" markets where there is only one realistic alternative, whoever holds the monopoly can do whatever the fuck he wants, captive audience.
And no, it's not possible to compete as a startup against Walmart or any other of the corporate giants (and not just in retail, it's valid across industries) - alone because the sheer scale of Walmart allows them to extort insanely cheap pricing out of vendors. Walmart can sell for far cheaper than any mom and pop store can acquire.
They already (at least Target and Walmart) do the “cheaper online than in store”) - if you catch it they’ll price match themselves but who is checking all prices every time?
Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. As a customer you can take a picture of the price, but then it'll be an argument of "This picture is old/doctored/AI".
Of course the chances of this sort of scam happening are probably not that high, but hey, considering the country is rotting more and more, from the top...
>Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check.
Even with paper tags, the store can't get someone to change the price while you're waiting at the cashier for a "manager" to show up?
Snap a pic I guess, there are many ways to game this either way, but if people start catching stores do this then it could lead to issues for the store.
I mean if you have a means of validating that a picture was taking at a particular time, then moments later your receipt shows a much larger price then we typically call that evidence.
It seems that we're in a phase where most parts of society is distorting reality to extract value from others. I don't know if it's a usual step in human groups cycles but it's worrisome.
One simple solution here (and for all sorts of legislated fines and thresholds) would be to tie them to inflation; it looks like the fine of $5,000 dates to the early 90s.
I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.
Time for direct action. Record the prices of a trolley full of goods. When a price rings up incorrectly, state loudly that you are not agreeing to that higher price scam and walk out, abandoning your goods at the checkout.
It would be best if a dozen of you went together and so closing all the checkout lanes.
Stores like Dollar General and Family Dollar are not cheap dollar stores. They are convenience stores. And convenience stores always charge more... for the... convenience of not having to make a longer trip to a larger store. Price mis-labeling aside, the premise of the article is wrong.
It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price.
You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
"This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
——
Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.
Yes, being poor is expensive and people just don't seem to grok that
Take energy. I'm not rich but I'm comfortable, my energy is paid for in an efficient way, I can shop around easily for the best rates for my lifestyle and so on. But if I had no money they'll fit a pay-per-use meter, they charge more money to fill that meter, if I can't fill it or forget to then the power goes out - and it's inconvenient to use it.
Years ago now I had a dispute with the water utility. I refused to pay, so, they eventually concluded that fixing their error was too difficult so they just created a new account starting from zero and wrote off all the costs for the disputed period entirely. If I'd been poor, they'd have threatened to cut off the supply (they're only threatening, fortunately it's not actually legal here to cease supplying clean water to poor people like they're not even animals) and sent scary people to demand payment.
> are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell
Clothes brands do this too.
Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores.
Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).
dollar tree seems to have found a new way to do this which may or may not be legal. Everything is priced at "$1.25 unless otherwise marked" but the markings don't actually tell you the price, only that it's not the $1.25 default price. There are price checkers throughout the store, but unless you're stopping and prescanning all of your stuff there's no actual way to know what you'll be paying until you get to the register. My partner is a regular there for cheap craft supplies and has seen what essentially amounts to dynamic pricing there, with the price varying up and down on the same item week by week.
They overcharge also via providing low quality products that seem comparable to name brands. Like the loosely wrapped toilet paper roles that have a fraction of what a normal roll has.
Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.
You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.
I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).
> no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK.
So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point.
> Dad journalism
Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect?
> You should not update on this article
Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean.
> (…) a national report found that (…)
Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped.
The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.
"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain
Seems to me that failing any inspection is bad. 4300 in three years and in half the country is clearly a lot. That’s almost four failed inspections per day, double the number of mass shootings (which is also too high and even one is bad).
Also, the paragraphs immediately following what you quoted provide more context. Over 50% error rate is obviously a lot, as is failing 28 inspections in a row.
> The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad.
Is it? Seems to me the thesis of the article is how this broken system is punishing poor people even further: “As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it”. Which parts specifically make you believe that the thesis of the article is that these stores are uniquely bad?
In Austria the retailer simply has to honor their lowest labeled price. Only clear and obvious errors like if the price would be just cents instead of euros are exempt
I had a clerk flip out on me a while back at a Dollar Tree because I wanted a charge for a dollar -- it rang up as 1.25. They rolled their eyes and told me not everything is a dollar, and I maintained that absent pricing stickers indicating otherwise, the default is a dollar. When I pointed out another way to look at it is it's a twenty five percent price discrepancy, someone came out of an office and literally screamed at me and chased me out of the store for "causing a problem", telling me that if I'm going to cause problems, so will she.
I wasn't cursing or yelling, just calmly making the points I made above as the employees took a dive bar approach to customer service...
It doesn't surprise me at all that this kind of thing is intentional -- they're banking on you not walking out without the item having carried it to the checkout.
I can't cite details, but I believe that case law has settled this many times.. When a customer enters a commercial business, there are implied contracts that are enforceable.. I am thinking of restaurants first. I believe it is the responsibility of the goods and services provider to show prices accurately and honor them, and variations of that are well-understood in court. These kind of transactions are common for thousands of years in the West.
>They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press.
I'd love to see a citation on that, since I think you're mistaken -- there's plenty of things that are still a dollar, mostly stuff like packages of napkins or plastic cups, cards and other sundries.
(What was extensively covered was that they were no longer a "everything is a dollar" store.)
They are attributing malice/greed to what is more likely just incompetence compounded by inflation. The employees most likely haven't updated the pricing on the shelves. If you have ever been in a DG or DT, you can see that the inventory is generally a mess and just put everywhere. There is one or two people up at the front. They don't have as many people stocking shelves as a grocery store to keep the inventory in order.
In Ireland, knowingly charging more than th display price is a criminal offence; the fake sales mentioned in the article are also illegal, though I’m not sure if that one’s criminal or civil. I expect it’s similar elsewhere.
_Prosecution_ is often more of an effective threat for companies than summary fines, as judges will tend to throw the book at repeat offenders.
Also, the nature of US urbanisation might be a factor. If you can get to more stores easily it’s harder for them to screw your; you will just go elsewhere.
I tend to do my shopping in small batches when walking home from work, and have a decent short term memory for numbers. I don’t remember _ever_ being overcharged by the likes of Tesco/Lidl/whatever. Very occasionally by small shops.
We might also acknowledge that a pretty significant share of people do know that already and just shrug their shoulders to it, convinced that it's better to allow for that than do anything about it.
There's been a lot of work put into distilling "free market" into its most radical interpretation, and lots of people just aren't open to bringing much nuance or pragmatism to bear upon it any more. Many lessons learned painfully in late 19th and early 20th century have been forgotten and the counterweight and containment policies that they earned now tend to get ignored or dismantled.
And somehow instead of trying to make it better, there are never ending attempts to make it even worse somehow ( if some of the patents are to believed ). I honestly sometimes wonder if some of the stuff is not in place already only because public reaction if all those were plopped in place in one go.
Well, why don't the ethical non-predators open up shops in economically disadvantaged areas and offer non-predatory prices? The margins must be huge if they really are predators.
Good question, was on my mind too. The problem I could see is Walmart style - the predator will beat the prices of the non-predator down until the non-predator goes out of business, then raise their prices again.
They can do this because they are operating in other areas with predatory prices, giving them the ability to operate at a loss, and relying on the fact that at least some of those areas are not being challenged by non-predators.
Everybody seems to be playing the game right in this scenario. Interesting to try to come up with a good counter.
Does this actually happen? If a community opened up a co-op shop that started eating into the revenue of a dollar store, would the dollar store company try to fight back, or would they just exit that market?
Yes, I guess well capitalize companies could offer unrealistically low prices, but on the other hand, any kind of co-op or community driven organization has the benefit of not needing the margins. Dollar store investors are there to make a buck, if their capital isn't getting reasonable returns will ultimately exit the business and move somewhere else.
Cooperatives do not get rid of the net negative cycle. Ultimately whatever the benevolent entity ends up being, it becomes a contest of who can bear to lose more money.
Cooperatives distribute the losses but it is still a money pit.
Isn't it just the predators that care about stock price to enrich themselves? Couldn't a co-op exist which offered non-predatory pricing and didn't try to maximize their stock price constantly? And real estate in destitute rural areas is generally dirt cheap.
Of course this could be offered. But, no one wants to do it because it's a thankless job. And if you're going to do a thankless job, you'd probably rather get paid a lot of money to do it than very little
You're ducking the argument. The loot from predatory practices is quickly absorbed not just by the single player perpetuating them, but by their complements in the economic network -- complements which a competitor would have to deal with on the loot-enriched terms, which turn launders exploitation into a "necessity" and transforms any charity into a weakness that will ensure your replacement. That's what Nash Equilibrium is, and it's an elementary result of game theory that Nash Equilibrium can lie very far from the global optimum. Even the global minimum can be a Nash Equilibrium. We should aspire to do better.
It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad.
Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.
Yeah. Why do I have to pay a plumber to install gas appliances? It's just a protectionist racket.
Point is, it's easy to screech "predation" or whatever but the problem is that every one of these things has some justification that can be used in the abstract.
It does legitimately cost more to run a store like Dollar General than Walmart so the same can of beans has to cost more on their shelf for the same margin.
How much more, how much is justified? I don't know.
I know we're all idiots here because that's what easy tech money does to people but retail margins are razor thin. You can't just make thoughtless trite statements about what they "should" do because a few percent here and there is the difference between red and black and red means prices go up. I'm sure they're happy to not invest in accuracy when it makes them money but there's a pretty wide gulf between being sloppy because it suits you and actively making a business out of deceit.
As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions.
Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.
Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.
in 2025 I'm surprised you can't just scan everything on your phone yourself and get the up-to-date price. are there laws stating things must be a posted price? seems easier for everyone to have something you can scan that show you the latest price, or auto updating tags.
Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia.
It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading.
In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.
> Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.
We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.
Listen, I know we all love to circle jerk about how dollar stores are evil, but you can walk into just about any regional chain supermarket and replicate the same exercise and get about the same results.
Sorry, real people who are on a real (strict) budget pay attention to the price of goods when they shop. If you are really hurting from a $3 overcharge, chances are you pay very close attention to the register receipt and bring it to the store's attention. Regardless of income, my wife and I routinely scrutinize the register receipt. Force of habit.
Can you? I think the implicit counterclaim in TFA is that other supermarkets/stores don't fail state pricing inspections nearly as often. If you have evidence/articles showing that TFA has cherry-picked dollar stores for criticism, that would be helpful to share.
I've got one local grocery store where the meat prices are sometimes off and another where it's the bakery. The fact that it seems to be confined to certain departments makes think it has a lot to do with the quantity and quality of labor being applied. And dollar stores being dollar stores they apply the cheapest and they apply it sparingly. Not that that excuses it but it at least explains it.
I don’t think this is true. Even if pricing in the shelves is accurate, in my experience Dollar General is typically a little more expensive than a normal mid-range supermarket (or e.g. Amazon) for most things.
1. You help your friend wash the dishes and notice their hefty, 5-quart stainless steel pot. You look it up on Amazon and it's like $50.
2. At $store, you see something that looks like that size and style of pot, but for only $10. What a steal! It's even ultralight so it should be easier to load in the dishwasher...
*Several months later*
3. Your pot is all warped to hell, making it difficult to cook evenly. But your friend's pot is probably fine for the next few decades if not longer. (Note: if this were an oven pan the warping would make it dangerous to use.)
4. To add insult to injury, $store got two more of your dollars just because.
I picked the 5-quart pot because I've seen one of these with my own eyes.
In any case, OP would have been better off paying me $38 for nothing but crushing their dream of buying a decent quality $10 frying pan.
That's what I think people don't really get about being poor. They _know_ they are cash strapped. and like a cash strapped business, managing cash flow is more important than log term investments.
They _know_ buying a small bottle of dish detergent is more expensive per oz, but buying in bulk would require a 15-16 week lead across all their purchase categories.
then why do poor people shop there? is the idea dollar general is strategically misleading them to see prices advertised lower than a normal supermarket but in fact they are higher? i didn't think the article was making that strong of a claim at all. it seemed more like, operations are minimal and staffing short (which in theory enables lower prices) and they linked the staffing issue with simply just not being on top of updating price changes on the shelves
1) Misleading advertising? Yes. Obviously this is true if you accept both that their prices are generally higher, and that they’re advertising low prices.
2) They’re in more convenient locations - often on the drive home already - and are smaller so are faster to get in and out of when you’re hurrying to or from work.
3) If you’re _not_ working, they’re probably cheaper to _get to_, especially if you can’t drive, because they’re closer.
I’m not as up in arms about this as some - in some respects this is just a new iteration of the corner store or bodega, which have always been a little more expensive than supermarkets (and often a little disorganized…) - but it is the truth.
While the typical viewpoint is that "poor people" shop there, that's actually somewhat of a misnomer.
Most dollar stores in the US are located in rural locations, and in part because a lot of rural population is also "lower income" they get the appearance of "only the poor shop there". But the part the folks who label the stores as "for the poor" often overlook is the "ruralness" aspect. That dollar store might only be a five to ten minute drive away to grab something, meanwhile the Walmart or Target or other, that likely has the better deal (the 128oz of Tide for 9.99 vs the 8oz of Tide for $1.50) is a forty-five minute drive away one way. So couple 1.5 hours round trip commute, plus fuel costs for that 1.5 hours, and you start to see why folks would more likely shop at the dollar store vs. the store that actually gives them the better deal overall.
That's partly the "magic" of the dollar stores for corporate. They sprout up like weeds in rural areas much like Starbucks sprout up on every corner in cities. And they capture sales largely because by sprouting up like weeds, they are a shorter round-trip drive to grab sometime (esp. to grab those one or two things you forgot last weekend when you /did/ make the 1.5 hour round trip drive to go to the nearest Walmart for the better deals). These store's sales largely come from the 7-11/Starbucks method in the city: convenience.
And couple the above with the fact that in rural USA, there is effectively zero public transportation and very little in the form of uber/cab companies, and so if one does not have a car, one may be stuck shopping at the dollar store 5-10 minutes away even if one knows the stores are gouging.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are smaller stores that are generally the only option within a reasonable travel distance. Here in the South, you might be able to catch a bus to Wal-Mart, but it’ll take 2-3X more time (1 hour instead of 20 minutes), so people go with the closer option even thought it is more expensive. No guarantees that Wal-Mart will be cheaper either.
> listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50
I'm sure the US obsession with not putting the actual price (tax included) on the shelf helps a lot with this. I would notice quite quickly if a store would systematically overcharge me in Europe. It'd be much harder in the US where I expect the price on the shelf to not match the price at checkout.
Yes, but the US consumers are conditioned to see one price and pay a higher price. You and I might see +40% and think "that's too high a percentage". Others see +something and think "just like every other time". If they even look - I'm sure these items are often in a cart with many other items.
The stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store. They might remember one or two, but they won't remember (and therefore will not notice) enough of the shelf prices to notice the systematic overcharge at the register. In reality, a good number of the shoppers likely don't remember any of the prices from the shelf tags, and will not be mentally summing up what the final price should be, so those shoppers won't notice the discrepancy at all.
> stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store
We don't bother remembering it because we're in a high-enough trust society where that burden shouldn't be necessary.
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50.
This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...
Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops.
I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop.
Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not possible, because all the laptops had Office pre-installed. I told him i did not care and wanted to buy the laptop for the adverstised price.
After 15 minutes of discussion, some manager came frustrated what the problem was. I pointed to the price tag and told him i wanted to buy the laptop for that price exactly and if that was possible. It was, but it would require uninstalling Office, which took them another 15 minutes.
So i waited for another 15 minutes so they could remove Office. Back at home i powered on the laptop, popped in a usb disk and removed every partition that its harddisk ever had and started a nice fresh install without any bloatware.
The irony is even though Dollar Tree prices are honest because they all are the same $1.25 (excluding the new “More Choices” $3-5 items) they’re still ripping you off. I always shop on a per-unit basis e.g. dollars per pound or cents per ounce, since that’s how I actually eat food. I need a certain amount of calories and a certain quantity of food to survive, and the less I pay per unit, the lower overall cost. On a per-unit basis, DT is almost always the most expensive store around, because quantities are so small!
There are of course exceptions; I can recall not long ago for example buying a pound of Himalayan sea salt for a dollar. That was a solid deal, and I haven’t seen it since.
But generally speaking, if you want to save money, don’t go to Dollar Tree.
> I always shop on a per-unit basis e.g. dollars per pound or cents per ounce, since that’s how I actually eat food.
For staples that's definitely sensible but surely there are also times where you need one-off items where any extra amount would just be waste?
Not usually but yes at times DT makes sense.
And yes there are times when some cannot always afford bigger quantities. But we’re not talking about 50 pound bags at Costco here; The price per pound for a ten pound bag of something at Walmart vs a six ouncer at DT is substantial.
We used to buy raspberries, blackberries, blueberries etc at Dollar Stores. They wouldn't last a week in the fridge which is why they were at the Dollar Store, but we were eating them same-day or next day so spoilage wasn't a concern. Really helped the berry budget with toddlers.
That's not really a rip off, it caters to people who can't afford to buy in larger quantities.
That makes it sound even more like a rip off tbh.
Would you quote the same hourly rate to someone who wanted one hour of time versus a six month contract?
That sounds like it's basically the grocery equivalent of the boot theory of poverty. Poor people have to pay more in the long run because they can't afford to buy in bulk.
It’s slightly different for groceries. I am not poor but I also don’t want to buy perishables in bulk. I can choose to buy one week’s worth of lettuce to be eaten in a week, but by the seventh day the lettuce has visibly degraded. I want fresher produce, so I am willing to buy smaller amounts every two days.
When they say "groceries" they're not just referring to fresh produce but also to things like cereal, dried goods, canned goods, or other foods you might find at a dollar store. Though some of these stores like Dollar General do also stock fresh foods like eggs, meat, dairy, and produce.
This is exactly right and the reason that Costco shoppers are un-intuitively among the richest groups in the country (average $125,000 household income).
Costco is great for wealthy families, less so for less wealthy. People living in small apartments have no place to put 36 rolls of paper towels and 12 jars of pasta sauce.
Having a large home is a prerequisite for shopping at Costco.
We live in an apartment but use Costco to stock our freezer with meat and seafood. We also use it for gas, cat litter, eggs, and cheese (lasts a long time). Basically for perishables that only need to be stored so long.
Which is great, but you receive a fraction of the benefit wealthy households do.
They don't even build Costco in close proximity to poor people.
In addition to the other comment about perishables, storage space is another meaningful limiting factor that can vary with income level. Both the raw volume of available storage and the quality of the storage on things like temperature control, energy usage, accessibility, etc
There are some things at dollar tree that are a good deal and some that aren't.
I think part of the appeal when everything was a dollar was so that people would know exactly how much it would be when they went to check out. Then they could manage a little bit of money with precision.
Yes because when I need a small bag of snacks to put in my backpack before a flight, my first stop is to Costco and buy everything I need in bulk.
Dollar Tree regular items aren’t all $1.25 anymore. Maybe half of what I’ve purchased there recently (mostly craft/gift wrap/party supplies) have changed to $1.50 or $1.75. If you grab multiple of the same item each one can ring up a different price.
Unless you are buying cards. Maybe candy, too? I’d be curious about that.
You may be shocked to hear that there are no seas in the Himalayas.
Well ackshually, Himalayan salt does come from a sea (although this sea has disappeared a long long time ago) so it's not _technically_ wrong
SO what do you buy for food and where do you buy it?
With your focus on calories per dollar, do you also get supplements? Which ones and where?
Why are you so focused on this?
Is there any reason to assume they are “so focused” on it? Keeping an eye on unit or per-weight prices is somewhat conventional and pretty easy—at least I think most major grocery chains around here include that info right on the sticker.
At least where I'm at they're legally required to include that info and they appear to comply maliciously whenever possible. Sometimes it's slightly wrong. Often the unit of weight changes between items of the same sort. It's absurd.
I've been using Gemini or Chat GPT in store to quickly calculate the cost-per when two like items use different measures ex. ounces vs. lbs.
You did not understand the comment. The person is talking about units per dollar, not necessarily calories per dollar, or anything about health. If I can buy one sponge for $1.25 and three sponges for $3, for example, I prefer three. This has nothing to do with how many calories are in a sponge.
That's actually fascinating, because they surely weren't tracking the actual Office license keys, and getting their money back. The manager literally uninstalled Office just to spite you. That's super funny! Especially since it made zero difference to you in the end.
I worked at Geek Squad almost 20 years ago and here’s how it went.
We would preinstall office on say 80% of the door buster laptops for something like $29. Most people used office so they’d pay it. Occasionally some people didn’t want it so they’d buy a bare laptop.
If all the bare laptops had been sold, we’d remove office from one of the preinstalled laptops. Then we’d take the box and send it back to the inventory guys to process and get credit back from the vendor. As part of that process we were supposed to verify to Microsoft that the product wasn’t installed on any machines.
So they weren’t tracking keys, but the manager wasn’t doing it to spite the OP, he was just doing what the vendor asked for.
Oh thanks, that's really interesting. It makes more sense if there's a physical box involved -- I don't remember ever getting physical boxes for preinstalled software, but it makes sense that way.
I do. Up until 2005ish, Office install CDs and the code would be in the box with the PC. You needed them if you wanted to install optional features (or reinstall). Stores rarely did the full install.
Even after 2005 they still had physical boxes, just not with CDs.
I give it an even split between spite and genuinely not understanding how software licensing is tracked/preinstalled trials work, thinking "if they don't buy the office addon I need to make sure they don't receive one with the office addon" as they would have to do with most other products.
I did many of these preinstalls 20 years ago. When you get credit back from Microsoft they ask you to make sure the key isn’t installed anywhere. They don’t track it, but it is a retirement from the vendor not a misunderstanding on the part of the manager.
They do this same type of thing at car dealerships everywhere. Some pre-installed dealer add-on they just tack onto the total. Annoying.
I was really waiting for this to be a Windows bloatware where Linux laptops are cheaper since there's no unnecessary Microsoft license at all. So you are principled in not wanting to use Office, but unprincipled enough to go ahead and use Windows?? That's a bold position on HN. Linux or death!!!!
My brother in law needed that laptop for his studies back then. Since he does not annoy me with countless IT related requests like some other family members tend to do and he did not have much money, i did some research for him. School supplied all the necessary licenses for free and i installed an extremely optimised Windows.
This will be the year of Linux on the desktop!
TBF between SteamOS and ChromeOS I'd say that already happened some time ago.
Was this in the US? I never purchased computers from people in a storefront.
This is possible in the US but I'm sure in many other countries too where electronics and computer stores exist, not even counting the wide swath of Apple stores around the world.
No. Western Europe.
but you re-installed Windows which is the definition of bloatware and malware.
His studies required it.
Note that this law is only for certain products. We would have people at the liquor store I used to own point out mislabeling occasionally and claim we owed them the $10 difference from this law. While we tried to work with customers when we made a pricing error, not only does the accuracy law not apply to alcoholic beverages, but it would often be illegal for us to offer the customer the mistaken price. Alcohol retailers in MA are not legally allowed to sell their products for less than they purchased them.
That's probably aimed at reducing consumption.
I assume eliminating the "loss leader" concept is the main effect, since shops shouldn't otherwise price things as losses regardless? In which case it seems like it's meant to maintain some friction / overhead for people wanting to visit the stores, possibly reducing consumption at least for the price-sensitive.
In Texas the law exists as well, phrased as cannot offer price below wholesale price for alcohol which in effect bans “bottomless/all you can drink” deals as well. It is indeed designed as a way to discourage consumption
Selling at a loss can also be a monopolistic practice: a firm with enough capital can sell at a loss to capture the market, and then buy out their now-flailing competition.
There's a lot of old laws that special case alcohol in the US; mostly artifacts of prohibition and temperance movements.
>There's a lot of old laws that special case alcohol in the US
yes there are, but the anti happy hour laws are only from the 1970-80s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, raise the drinking age campaigns.
the previous round of laws like that were from the Temperance, Prohibition, lifting of Prohibition periods.
then before that, yes the Puritan Blue Laws.
Can't buy alcohol before noon on Sunday is one of my faves.
Don't want people stumbling into church drunk!
(That being said, even though I think it's a silly rule, it just seems to exist to annoy alcoholics who can't plan ahead. I'm not an alcoholic, and I rarely consume alcohol before noon, so I just laugh at people who whine about this law.)
Was at the airport on a trip with friends with the flight leaving before noon. None of the bars could sell. We are not alcoholics, but we were on vacation. Well, we were trying to start the vacation but had to wait until leaving uptight red state
> Well, we were trying to start the vacation but had to wait until leaving uptight red state
I live in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, and we still have special laws about Alcohol on Sunday. According to Gemini, Logan airport can't start serving until 10 a.m. (Because in Massachusetts, we don't want you getting drunk on the way to your Unitarian or interfaith Sunday service after you get off of your red-eye flight.)
You can also try reading https://www.mass.gov/guides/working-on-sundays-and-holidays-... if you have the time.
>That's probably aimed at reducing consumption.
it's aimed at not encouraging consumption which is slightly different. you can have a "hungry hour" where you entice people with food bargains and sell them alcohol, but you can't have a "happy hour" where you entice people with alcohol bargains.
it is also in keeping with other laws intended to create a competitive/collusion free market (not saying the crafting of those laws was not influenced by incumbents trying to maintain their share)
Is alcohol the only exception?
It's in the article linked
> When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.
In Australia, when scanners became common, the law was "in the event of a mismatch, the consumer gets first item free, and any subsequent items at the lower price".
Michigan in the 90s had a similar rule. Customer gets 10x the overcharge (up to $5 max). I can guarantee you they fixed the price immediately.
Where I live there’s no such rule I can tell you no one is correcting the price when I point out that I got overcharged (they usually shrug with “it does that sometimes”).
"It does that sometimes." I guess for some reason the minimum wage cashier was not fully invested in maximizing the customer experience.
Somehow the entity exploiting both parties of the exchange is not actually present or accountable for anything that happens in the exchange.
See: 'accountability sinks'[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694]
It's different in different states. In Maryland, once a complaint is filed with the relevant authority, the store has a certain number of days to correct pricing. Most retailers will give you the misprice if it's clearly their fault in not changing the tags, as a matter of policy.
The confusion around this law is quite frustrating, though. Quite a few customers think they're entitled to not just prices on tags that haven't been updated, but prices for what are clearly entirely different products.
Is it a certain number of days to fix all the mispriced items?
If not, there’s an obvious loophole here. Misprice intentionally, then stop purchasing the item from your distributor if you get called on it, rotating in some similar thing. Later, bring it back with a different sku, or mispriced at some other level.
This would work well for dollar stores, which are optimized to spread in / sustain food/retail deserts.
The store is often literally the only option in town. The wouldn’t even need to sell excess warehouse inventory at the advertised price, since they could just shift supply to another state (or county/store, depending on how poorly the law is worded).
This seems to be the handbook for price complaint inspections following a complaint to the relevant authority (in this case, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General).
https://mda.maryland.gov/Documents/HANDBOOK%20130%20Examinat...
Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)
I live in MA and wish that this were true, but do you have data / evidence to support that it rarely happens? Also, I don't know if you have tried to get your $10, but it's not like the sign is always obvious and every time I've tried, it's not like the cashier says "oops" and gives you the thing for free - they call a manager, the manager argues with you, other customers complain about the checkout delay you've created... there's social pressure there so I can understand why customers would not do this even when they can.
> other customers complain about the checkout delay you've created
Other customers are complaining about the checkout delay the store created, so I'm not worried about what they think.
I've done this many times, and it usually takes about 5min (which sounds short, but isn't really that short). There is social pressure, but it's even stronger on the store than it is on you as a customer.
If this happens you can file a consumer complaint with the attorney general's office... https://www.mass.gov/how-to/file-a-consumer-complaint
They do follow up with serial offenders.
Right, as a UK tabloid I'm surprised they didn't mention that the UK has similar laws. If you are overcharged you can ask for a refund, and the store has to honour it:
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...
In the 00s I worked for a supermarket that would always honour the price on the label if you pointed out an error (we'd then remove the label with the error).
We had teams that would regularly check all the labels to make sure they are not out of date. Nowadays many stores where I live now use e-paper displays that update automatically.
Is this a recent law? I lived most of my life in MA and I've never heard of this, and never noticed one of those signs.
How long has this been the law? I lived in Boston for a while and don't remember this.
I remember it from at least 2014, and wrote about it in 2019: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ma-price-accuracy-law
so if I find one that is has the wrong price and get $10 off, I could potentially "buy" all of them for free?
... American "dollar stores" have items in the first place at $10+? I thought it was already amusing when Dollarama reached the $5 CAD threshold.
Family Dollar and Dollar General (the subjects of this piece) are not traditional “dollar stores” (and haven’t been in a long time) despite having Dollar in the name. They’re just discount stores, like a smaller Wal-Mart. Dollar Tree, on the other hand, had long been a traditional dollar store where most items are priced at a dollar. However after pandemic-induced inflation they have mostly changed to a $1.25-$1.50 price point and now have a number of items marked above that as well.
Even referring to them as discount stores is disingenuous as the items are mostly more expensive per unit, per weight, than at competitors.
Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.
In 2025, Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar to a group of private-equity firms: Brigade Capital Management, Macellum Capital Management and Arkhouse Management Co.
https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/d...
It’s a business model cosplaying as poverty relief while quietly siphoning money from the people least able to lose it. They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model. That 23% increase is not a glitch. They know their customers can’t drive across town to complain. They know the regulators won’t scale fines to revenue.
Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.
And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call
Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - info that often conflicts with public statements and reports to govs.
Like CapEx expenditures/forecast and the actual reasons that certain segments over/underperform. It's a solid way to catch corporations issuing bald-faced lies (for any press, public, gov that are paying attention).
I'll bet 1 share that there are moves to get this admin to do away with the requirement.>I'll bet 1 share...
I won't be your counterparty on that bet, you've already won:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants...
One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't know what's going on, because by definition you can't know, not outside those 4 times a year. In which case there's a reasonable chance the requirement to do so is the only thing that's kept it from going off the rails.
I rarely agree with Trump, but I'm a former exec at a public company and he's not wrong. You need a horde of lawyers and accountants and investor relations and SOX compliance people and auditors etc for the earnings reports. SOX adds burdensome processes at every layer of the organization. Your CFO and CEO will be preoccupied by earnings. It's a real disincentive for a small/medium cap company to go (or stay) public. A PE firm taking a company private can get rid of all this overhead on Day 1.
Not to mention, quarterly reports incentivize a company to focus on the current quarter instead of longer-term sustainability. Reporting twice a year doesn't solve all the above problems, but it sure would reduce them a little.
Worth noting, though, that the SOX "burden" came out of Enron and WorldCom. I'd be willing to debate the actual mechanics of the burden and see if streamlining the regulations for modern companies is possible, but I won't accept that the burden is unjustified.
Yes, opaque accounting was a real problem. I would love to see a more streamlined, modern take on SOX. Today's SOX, in practice feels like a box-checking exercise and mandatory funneling of money to accounting firms who don't understand the intricacies of (among other things) modern software development. They forced inefficient processes on my company and weren't willing to discuss smarter solutions. No doubt there are better SOX auditors & consultants than I dealt with. But its part of the reason companies now stay private for longer and prefer secondary rounds for employee liquidity. So now retail investors miss out on the action, while accredited investors have even less transparency than a pre-SOX public company.
Twice a year reporting also makes it easier for insiders to cash out before bad news becomes public.
Almost all insiders file trading plans far in advance as a defense against accusations of insider trading. Twice-a-year reporting actually makes it harder for insiders because they will have to file their trading plans further in advance. And it doesn't stop shareholders from suing insiders if they believe there was actual insider trading.
Wait, where in this proposal did you see a change in requirements around planned selling? My assumption, perhaps unfair, certainty supported by trends in US lawlessness, is that the whole scheme is to change reporting but not windows for planned sales.
There is a huge difference between reconciling things for your own business strategy and reconciling things in accordance with federal public company reporting standards for publicly traded companies.
These standards are different than IRS reporting.
That doesn’t change anything: there isn’t anything in the reporting requirements that I can look at and say “that’s useless I wouldn’t want to know that about my business”
There are entire classes in graduate school (I am an MBA dropout) that specifically focus on Management Accounting used to make internal decisions that are different than the accounting that you have to do for public accounting.
I don’t care about the GAAP depreciation guidelines when I’m deciding something if my own internal metrics show that I can get twice the useful life out of equipment
There's a huge difference between internal and external reporting from an effort and benefit perspective.
>If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability.
Under the existing legal and regulatory model, yes.
But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.
> what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse
The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less.
My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.
Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.
And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to do without having the calculation already?
> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers
My thinking was it should be simple to produce. Maybe for revenue only you eliminate the balance sheet and maybe P/L or cap table requirements.
> how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company?
I was thinking headline valuations, but you’re right. Skip valuation.
> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.
I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.
It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue.
A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.
> It's a single-member LLC
Maybe exempt pass-throughs?
Why do it for entities of that size at all? It's not about their type of incorporation, it's about not adding more paperwork for small businesses.
You're using or. That means you don't need a low revenue number. You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless, so all you need is to catch the few outliers that manage to be major companies without hitting the employee threshold.
> You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless
Out of curiosity, why $10bn versus $1bn?
So? At 10M revenue what are the chances they don't have an accountant who does their taxes and already has all the relevant info? Asking their accountant to crank out one extra form is not going to break the bank.
> But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits
After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass.
Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.
I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom.
How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities.
For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives:
This is not some random accident, this is the inevitable equilibrium of shareholder primacy.The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act.
That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet.
And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist.
Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders.
1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine). 1980s:Shareholder primacy took over.
Shareholders were not always in control. Their dominance "waxed and waned," and the current form of shareholder primacy is a late-20th-century financial ideology posing as an eternal law of nature.If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.
While I get your frustration, the root cause of the issue is not shareholder value maximisation, it's the failure modes of the free market.
Monopolies, lack of transparency, lack of competition, regulatory capture, failure to price in externalities are what allows this to happen.
And these failure modes are allowed to persist due to lobbying, normalised corruption, and the desire for a small/weak government.
The latter is useful for corporations, as it limits regulation, which is the main way these failure modes are supposed to be managed. Yes, too much/bad regulation is detrimental, but so is no/weak regulation.
The more baffling thing is that the modal American voter supports lax regulation and pro-corporate rules at their own personal expense.
I'm curious what you think VCs, etc. who are investing in all these private companies want to do?
The only difference with public companies is we actually have data about their finances.
The private companies are doing it all under wraps.
Don’t conflate two different investment models.
1. Investors who want to invest in companies with a growth story and want the company to grow bigger and be “successful” enough to exit either via an acquisition or the public market. But often times these days, just to pawn off to the greater fool.
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
2. Investors who want to go in and make the company worse and do enough value extraction for short term gains. The canonical case is when a restaurant chain owns its own real estate. They split off the restaurant from the underlying real estate and make the restaurant pay rent that goes up. The restaurant flounders and the real estate holdings increase in value.
And another strategy is to acquire companies in your vertical, roll them all up, fire redundant staff and integrate systems and then exit. Of course you enshitify the smaller once independent mom and pop systems in the process.
We can still have shares and pay out dividend. Then when you want to sell your shares they are like a fixed price?
There can be many models. One model is just to have shares expire after a certain point, the same way options do. Or undergo demurrage (a discount that grows from 0 to 100% over a decade, for instance, where the remaining % from the sale goes back to the ecosystem and is distributed as UBI to all tokenholders).
In fact, staking your shares and getting a perpetual flow of utility tokens, or selling the shares, could be a good compromise. But the shares would cease to confer voting power or dividends. The dividends would be paid out in the utility token itself. So the utility tokens might get devalued if there are too many of them, or they could be burned as transaction fees for instance, reducing their supply. There are a ton of possibilities.
Reinterpreting shares as something like a bond with a yield in the ecosystem's own currency makes things much more sustainable. Yes, the shareholders would still want the ecosystem's growth to outpace the token issuance, but also, they could just increase the fees' burn rate of tokens. But that's like extracting rents. So yes, I think eventually, shares should simply get less and less dividends over time. Look at the Miracle of Worgl and their currency undergoing demurrage, for instance.
In the ideal scenario, though, new companies would have no IPO ever, only ICO of utility tokens. Just make IPOs almost impossible to do from a regulatory point of view. It's becoming rare anyway. This would mean that early shareholders would get their returns by staking shares and receiving utility tokens which they sell to ecosystem participants (so they're incentivized to help grow the entire ecosystem, refer new customers etc.) And eventually, the market cap of the shares is totally phased out due to demurrage and the utility tokens is all that remains.
Or perhaps we go one step further by making shareholders also owners. They get to take their part (as determined by the amount of shares they possess) of the profits and equally have to cough up their part of the losses.
This would return closer to the model where you invest into a business because you believe in it.
Stop trying to reimagine stocks as crypto to try to justify a failed attempt at manifesting a problem that cryptocurrency can attempt to be a solution to.
Stop hating on crypto just because you're on HN, and consider that actual problems have grown very large with current systems. This is the problem with many HN denizens -- they keep correctly posting about problems, but then dismiss solutions out of hand because they're against the groupthink. Then 10 years later the problem is worse, but you get triggered by the word "cryptocurrency" (which by the way I didn't even say).
As a result, you totally ignore the very real problems that get bigger and bigger due to late-stage shareholder capitalism, and call it a "failed attempt to manifest" the problems.
I'm not saying this out of groupthink. If you just change the word "stocks" to "token", and don't change the fundamentals of ownership of "stocks" being basically indicated by entries in the ledger of an asset tracking company, that provides a foundation for conducting trades for financial gains at the stroke of a pen you've accomplished nothing. In the transformation to tracking the same damn thing with a block chain or crypto token, if you're providing the same abstractive benefits, you've got nothing but a change in detail, but not in kind. Tokens will be traded on info or trends as monied interest recognizes value to be squeezed out of the fact of owning a share, having voting rights/influence on operations, or claim to a flow of future value. Same shit, different wrapper, it's just a token now, and we're blowing eith bookoo power doing PoW, or creating more centralization through PoS, to process transactions that were previously accomplished with an entry in one of a handful of company's databases, and some paperwork.
So if you want to sell tokenization as not being stocks/shares by another name, tell me how you're changing the fundamentals. I buy into ventures to say, get dividends, or knowing I'll lose money, but hoping to see something manifest that I want to see that may not be profitable yet, but I want to be a part of. How does your change to tokens differ at all, from me buying shares of stock?
If you can't provide an answer to that, I continue to stand by my original statement. Unless, of course, you're being a proponent of a public database of beneficial ownership of all legal fictions. In which case you might get some interest out of me, but I guarantee you'll run into other forms of Dead on Arrival until you fix/address the whole problem around said database basically provides a map for targeting all of the top centralizations of capital, which none of those individuals will probably be okay with being the case to the degree it will be prevented through buying out political clout.
Thinking it's a good idea to abolish private ownership because of the most pathological cases is probably sawing off the branch you're sitting that keeps you away from socialism and mass starvation policies.
I'm not sure why private equity is singled out here, when every time a public company does a bad (eg. Boeing), people crow about how public companies only care about juicing next quarter's earnings.
The big difference is the extent to which PE will go to juice the quarters earnings. Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back. PE will do all of the above and more if it means they get their money. Which means, you as a customer get screwed over more when PE is involved.
>Public companies cannot and will not just fire all staff, fleece customers to the point they won’t return and take on debt that they have no intention of paying back.
Why? Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.
And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you start intentionally sinking it.
But doesn't extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself mean front loading profits - i.e. long-term worse outcomes?
How does a PE company make money from that - unless who they sell it to is not saavu enough to realize it?
If they sell all the assets owned by the company, they don't need to sell the company itself. They just need to find another one to strip.
> PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself.
Not all PEs model. The ones you are referring to are often buying large businesses (like the infamous Toys R Us) load them with debt and strip their assets. 90% of the other PEs out there do not do this...in fact the opposite. They put capital on their balance sheet to grow.
What is the "company itself" if not its owners (private equity company that is)? Everything else is just an asset of it. If they see a way to maximise profit by draining the company that's better than any other one, why not? After all if company is then simply liquidated, it frees up market opportunity for new entrants.
Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline, and everybody knows it. There is absolutely no incentive to add value beyond the next sale, and often you only need to add the perception of value. To quote my CTO of a PE owned company: "we want to make it look like we're on the road to <big investment in strategic roadmap>", not actually accomplish it
> Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline
Berkshire Hathaway is a PE fund with permanent capital.
Broadly speaking, making generalisatios about PE is almost impossible because it's an asset class which is, essentially, all non-public business. Instead, it's more useful to think about which element private equity touches you're specifically complaining about: capitalism in general, financial transparency, leverage and liability.
The problem with PE is only the hyper aggressive and generally terrible ones make the news.
The quiet ones that simply run business well, don't make the news.
There are PE firms that specialize in rescuing distressed companies with potential and turning them around. In many cases not firing anyone and holding onto the form they acquired for a long time.
> quiet ones that simply run business well, don't make the news
And don’t call themselves PE. They’re a diversified family business. Or a VC fund. Or whatever the fuck the Ellison’s are doing to Paramount.
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
There's a pattern of behavior, to be sure. The primary control on public companies is shareholder scrutiny. Gutting your company for short term gains, is not always popular. The more diverse the shareholder cohort, the less popular it tends to be.
Private companies don't mind it when they can literally start a new company with the assets from the old without the pesky plebian investors.
Ofc you know this.
> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones?
It's more about Private Equity firms than private companies. The oversimplified TL;DR strategy for most PE firms is acquire, strip, pump, then dump (combined with all sorts of tax strategies). Most PE firms don't own the companies themselves, but act on behalf of investors and take a cut of the ultimate profits. So it's basically tons of short term thinking.
To me PE is just secondary effect of incentivizing private pension schemes over pay-as-you-go schemes in the last half century to me.
A huge wealth transfer in disguise providing capital to financial actors (not at last PE) that are usually not aligned with goals of regular employess: affordable housing and healtcare and reasonably safe jobs.
As Germany is on it's way to dismantle it's core of it's pay-as-you-go mandatory state pension insurance and shift towards private, and privat-by-proxy schemes via company pension plans. Europe might be also going that way some time in the near future, but without the comparably healthy demographics of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1978
Funny that all those charts eventually go back to Carter allowing for 401k not, Reagan, though that reuse only happened later.
My bigger hunch here is supplying the capital markets with that much additional money was a mistake, that ultimately lead to the current guilded age and accelarated existing trends of in the productivity–pay gap, social stratification and wealth inequality, if not solely being responsible for it.
It seems outright impossible for most to compete with a economic reality where the accrued value of like a third of your and everyone else's paycheck is actively working against your net quality of living, when you're not in the top 1 to 10% where the capital gains are a still a net positive over the increased cost of housing and wage stagflation etc.
Galaxy brain: both are bad, although at least a public company is, ostensibly, trying to make a good or provide a service (lol).
>although at least a public company is, ostensibly, trying to make a good or provide a service (lol).
/s?
No? Companies aren't about making things anymore, they're about stock buybacks and making as much money as possible while doing as little as possible (or selling our data). That's why the refrigerators have ads and break after two years. At least private equity is more honest about being vulchers, whereas Kohler is going to look you dead in the eyes and try to convince you you need a toilet with a camera in it. What a joke.
>At least private equity is more honest about being vulchers,
Again, what's the basis of this? Half the people in this thread seem to take it for granted that PE is somehow "worse" than public companies, but can't seem to articulate why. The only legal difference between public companies and "private equity" is that the former has stricter reporting requirements and can be bought by non-accredited investors. There's nothing about "ostensibly, trying to make a good or provide a service" or whatever.
PE does this wealth extraction trick which breeds the ill-will.
Eg: purchase a few mom&pop veterinarian business in some area. Squeeze the service rates, trim hours, reduce staff, add some debt. The PE investor gets cash out - the business is destroyed and the community loses a (critical? valuable?) service.
It's a common pattern. But not all PE is like this. Like "not all men" and "not all guns" - but enough that the pattern is easily associated - and disliked by many w/o the power to keep them out.
I think generally it is a complaint against the soullessness of corporatism versus ownership that actually cares about delivering a good product and treating their customers and employees right.
Greed is very high right now. And you can see that in the behavior of all types of companies. Historically when greed is high like this you eventually end up with a Lehman Bros or Enron situation that causes a painful market place correction.
Private equity is far worse. It means 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all.
At least public companies have some diversity in ownership and agenda.
I think this checks all the above boxes, but for a public company. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk6kvyxvzo
This is utterly disgraceful. With that said he did ratify it with shareholders so it is what it is.
>Private equity is far worse. It’s mean 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all.
...as opposed to the average public company? An average company might have more "average joe" shareholders (almost by definition, because private equity is typically off limits to non-accredited investors), but outside of meme stocks, there's not enough of them to make a difference. The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.
I see these private equity takes on HN frequently and am really baffled by the ignorance. There's a very clear difference between a public and private company - the fiduciary duty to shareholders.
There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.
There is no such requirement for a private company. In practice (esp. recent history), this means private equity firms acquire successful businesses to "mine them" of their wealth - capitalizing their assets for personal gain, and leaving nothing left.
The question for public companies isn't how many retail vs institutional investors they have, it's whether an investor can make a claim about a breach of fiduciary duty. It's patently false to say that the institutional investors (who yes, do have more sway) aren't interested in the company acting in their financial interests.
> There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders
No, there isn't.
The whole point of Revlon duties is that they trigger "in certain limited circumstances indicating that the 'sale' or 'break-up' of the company is inevitable" [1]. Outside those conditions, "the singular responsibility of the board" is not "to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available."
> There is no such requirement for a private company
Are you thinking of minority rights? These vary based on whether a company is closely held or not [2], not whether it's public or private.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon%2C_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%....
[2] https://millerlawpc.com/rights-minority-shareholders-private...
Why bring up Revlon duties when as you say, their relevance is only during company acquisition or restructuring?
It's well established over hundreds of years of case law that directors of public companies have to act in good faith to benefit the company (and therefore, the shareholders).
Weird cherry pick.
> Why bring up Revlon duties when as you say, their relevance is only during company acquisition or restructuring?
It’s an exception that proves the rule. In that specific case, what you’re saying applies. In all others, it does not.
> It's well established over hundreds of years of case law
Where are you getting this from?
> directors of public companies have to act in good faith to benefit the company (and therefore, the shareholders)
Where did you get that this only applies to public companies? What you’re describing is basic English and Delaware corporate law.
Also, there is a massive difference between “all shareholders” and “the shareholders”. And nothing about public companies says they can’t be structured in a way that sometimes undermines some shareholders. This comes up most commonly when different shares have different voting or blocking rights. But it’s also fundamental to the intent behind B Corps, publicly traded or not.
> Where are you getting this from?
I seriously doubt you're operating sincerely in this thread, given your ability to cite Revlon. But on the off chance, start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> And nothing about public companies says they can’t be structured in a way that sometimes undermines some shareholders.
See above.
> seriously doubt you're operating sincerely in this thread, given your ability to cite Revlon
I know about the topic and can correctly cite sources, herego I'm operating insincerely?
> start here [1]
You're citing a 1919 Michigan state court decision concerning the Ford Motor Company. Ford went public in 1956 [2]. The sole source you've cited is about a then-private company from over 100 years ago.
You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/16/63-years-later-wha...
You're operating insincerely by attacking low quality interpretations of what I'm saying, among other problems. For example:
> You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.
Wouldn't that mean my statement is incomplete, not "doubly wrong", if it applies to all businesses, not just public ones?
Similarly, cherry picking sources that support narrow scenarios tangential to the discussion (Revlon) is not sincere.
By this point it's clear your religious grasp on the distinction between public and private companies will not be shaken. I'll continue living in reality, where in fact directors of private companies do act against the interests of the company itself (and in practice are still in accordance with the law), paying themselves off and leaving an insolvent heap. I'm honestly shocked regarding your insistence that public and private companies are the same in this matter; I can only assume that you already have, or stand to, gain from such a private endeavor, and this is causing a cognitive dissonance that is at fault for the vomit you've spewed above. Good day.
>There is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders. In practice, and according to precedent, this means long term viability of the company, in other words, a sustained profitable business.
All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures. It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
Yes, that's the major difference between the public and PE companies that OP was highlighting. The owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures. They have to sell it off to someone else to do that.
Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders.
> owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures
This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
> Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders
Merger law is largely state corporate law. If you have a Delaware C corporation, you're operating under more or less the same merger rules irrespective of how your stock is traded.
What may be misleading some folks is that in a private company, these deliberations are typically covered by NDAs. In public companies, it happens in the open. With private companies, someone needs to get pissed off enough to sue. Herego the understandable availability bias.
To drive home how misleading this purported delineation is, consider that some of the largest private equity managers (e.g. Blackstone and KKR) are themselves publicly traded.
Private equity has tons of issues. Tons. In some industries (e.g. healthcare) it shouldn’t exist. But this tripe about public companies having duties to shareholders which private companies don’t is nonsense.
> This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe…
> Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe
More of an in addition to than instead.
> All that means is that controlling shareholders can't use the company as a piggy bank and raid it to fund their other ventures
Yes, you're getting it now.
> It doesn't mean the business has to be "sustainable" or whatever. In fact, it's perfectly legal for the board to sell to a "vulture" PE firm that will sell the business off for parts, as long as the sale price is good enough.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread - the sale itself is required to maximally benefit the shareholders.
Public companies are interested in quarterly profits. But for the most part still have longer term goals and don’t purposefully make decisions that will make the company worse off in the long term.
Apple is not going to sell off all of its real estate into separate company, force the other half to rent it and then sell off the rental holdings. Even when it was almost bankrupt it didn’t “shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders”.
The former is a standard PE play. I’ve been part of the “roll up small companies and enshittify them and go public” playbook. I was the lead architect at the parent company designing the software system that integrated the disparate systems of the target companies.
Funny enough I worked for a startup that I loved in 2018-2020 and only left because a job at BigTech fell into my lap. After leaving BigTech in 2023, the company that acquired the startup I worked for (a PE backed acquire and enshittify company) offered me a job as the architect to consolidate their systems based on a referral. I booed out after having a lot of discussions with their internal management and one with a representative from their investor.
It’s hell being under the thumb of a PE companies management (not the internal management) they second guess everything and the level they were hiring me for, I would have dealt with the PE investors representatives directly
> I see these private equity takes on HN frequently and am really baffled by the ignorance.
Probably a good time to note that you’re posting this comment on a website created by a private equity firm for promotional purposes.
Zing! Gotem! Reddit moment xD
quite the opposite actually, your comment adds nothing to the discussion
If someone is baffled that the tone of a private equity company’s message board is pro private equity then I think it’s an excellent reminder.
I think it’s useful to point out that Silcon Valley is a rapaciously predatory and financialized business climate precisely because because they spend so much time and money on PR to convince everyone otherwise.
The biggest difference is not the morality of the management of the two types of companies, but the type of business they are into.
Many private companies are growth businesses. On the opposite side, private equity targets businesses which are stable, but not growing or declining. PE looks for products which have high cost to switch or products with no alternatives.
So when private equity buys the business they extract money in 3 ways: - Raise their prices. This is similar to the public companies, but they do it more aggressively, because their customers don't have a choice. For reference see, what VMWare did after it was bought by Broadcom (Broadcom is a public company which acts as a private equity). - Reduce costs, via layoffs and cutting smaller products. Also done by public companies, but the difference here is the magnitude. It is quite common for Private equity owned companies to have several years of 20% layoffs, until the original workers are completely replaced by workers in cheaper locations. Or not replaced at all which leads to a worse service. - And finally the third way a private equity extracts money from the acquired company by providing "services". Employees from the PE company are elected on the board of directors of the acquired company. A PE executive can become a CEO of an acquired company. PE companies have satellite companies, which provide legal, administrative and financial services to their companies.
On top of that the acquired company has to pay the loan which was used to be acquired.
Let me explain this with a simple example:
* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit * But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
In other words, PEs almost never lose money, so they could extract the last bit of a company, even more short sighted than shareholders of a public company
> If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit. But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
This isn't remotely true. Plenty of private equity investments go bust before they can pay themselves back. And plenty of public company investors milked a company for interest payments or dividends into the ground.
> PEs almost never lose money
Private equity funds regularly lose money. Usually to lenders.
You're complaining about leverage in general. Probably not private equity per se.
>* If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit
That's not necessarily a bad thing, or sign of anything sinister. If a business is failing, and you buy it for pennies on the dollar, and despite your best efforts it still goes under, so you liquidate it, you can still turn a profit if the price you paid is lower than what you got from liquidating it. That's not bad, because private equity (or anyone else, for that matter) isn't expected to operate as a charity. The only reason they're willing to stump up the cash to buy the business in the first place is the expectation that they'll make money. It's also not bad for the original owners either, because the fact that they hold to PE rather than someone else, or liquidating it, suggests that the PE offered a better deal than either.
>But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money
Often times yes, but sometimes not, eg. hertz.
> despite your best efforts
Citation needed.
If you’ve ever spoken to employees of a public company that was sold to private equity, you’ll know how much of a difference there is. It is a significant difference.
> The rest of the shareholders (eg. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, family offices) can be assumed to behave like ruthless capitalists chasing the highest returns, regardless of whether the company is public or not.
Right but they are seeking the highest returns as equity holders typically, usually through things like stock buybacks.
Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.
If you’ve ever seen the Goodfellas scene where they bust out the nightclub, that’s quite literally their business model.
>Private equity firms have much more devious ways of looting the companies, like management fees, acquiring other portfolio companies, and various other tricks.
"looting the companies" is non-nonsensical when they also own it. It's like saying a scrap yard is "looting" the cars it bought by taking out the valuable parts to resell or whatever. The rest of the stuff might make sense in the context of the LPs getting screwed over, but not in the context of portfolio companies that they own.
PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it. They use incredibly high leverage and often saddle the company with monstrous debt, then loot the assets to pay the interest and take management fees while doing all this. Red lobster is a great recent example. They sold off all the real estate, then had stores lease it back, turning profitable locations into losers. They often do the same thing with manufacturing, goodwill, brandnames and sales channels.
Think of this like an oil well. If you pump off all the gas, you depressurize the reservoir and can never get the oil. You need to slow your production to get the oil first, but private equity is happy to skim the cream and leave the milk to spoil.
> PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it.
This is simply untrue. A typical PE firm creates a GP fund using LPs money. This GP fund typically does a management buyout (which means 50.1% of more) of several companies using a mix of equity (e.g. GPs capital) and debt (banking lenders). So by every definition of the word, they absolutely own the company.
What you’re saying just isn’t true.
Looting the companies is accomplished by stacking up debt and then giving themselves the money. Occasionally there are a few variations like looting a pension fund or taking a high quality product and making it horrible and selling that until people notice.
It’s literally their business model, it’s happened thousands of times and is a very clear fixture of the modern American business climate.
If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
> It’s literally their business model
It's literally not. It happens to be the business model for a subsection of private equity (usually large cap) and its the one that gets most headlines. There are roughly ~5,000 M&A events per year (often involving PE) and yet you'll hear about 5~10 at most cases where the company gets loaded with debt and stripped of assets. The large plurality of PE groups are buy and hold for 4~7 years and are largely focused on EBITDA expansion.
> If you don’t know this it’s because you aren’t looking or it’s in your interest to say you don’t know this.
No offense, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about.
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
Yes. Productivity typically goes up [1]. Its reputation for job cutting is overblown [2], as is its record on price increases [3]. And historically, it's tended to decrease concentration in the industries it operates in. (The conglomerate break-ups of the 1980s were fuelled by new entrants and carve-outs.)
Instead, what I think we have is a category error. Berkshire Hathaway is a private equity shop as is all venture capital [4], and most family businesses of any scale are structured identically to sponsor-owned firms. Meanwhile, LBOs have been unable to shake the private-equity label for decades, unless they're lead by a founder, in which case they're "take private" transactions. In essence, we brand failed alternative asset strategies as private equity ex post facto.
Moreover, transaction size is negatively correlated with returns, particularly for leveraged buyouts. So the biggest private equity deals, which represent a minority of transaction activity, are disproportionately (a) bad and (b) public.
Finally, we get a lot of false conflation of market failures to private equity per se. Private-equity owned hospitals are bad [5]. But I haven't seen great evidence they're worse than other privately-owned hospitals with similar scale. The problem is hospitals probably shouldn't be run for profit or on-locally. But because nobody in particular is defending private equity, that's easier to attack.
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=67233
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43495362
[3] https://centers.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/cpee/files/Is_Pri...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_private_equit...
[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2813379#go...
The question anyone reading this analysis should ask is: if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from?
The unlock, which these papers don't understand, is the extractive nature of P/E that is hidden.
A few clues: 1. A .5%-1% increase in prices is meaningful (Overall industry prices rise after buyouts, but again the price increase is on average very modest.) Retails margins routinely are measured in fractions of percentage points (bps). As an example, even if overall hospital prices stayed similar, P/E firms have been caught jacking up prices on people who need it most. Research on "Surprise Billing" in emergency rooms spiked immediately after PE firms took over staffing groups. Are you surprised?
2. Equity multiples are "effectively" a form of stealing from retail / pension plans: this is where the real 'theft' happens (if you want to call it that). If you reraterevenue from 6x (private) to 15-20x, someone is now paying 2-3x more per dollar to have that company in society. The key is the P/E OWNERS reap that value, so even if there are no job cuts, the wealth being created aggregates 'money supply' to the owners. This has downstream impacts on inflation.
3. Independent of aggregate effects - local effects are quite devastating. This is not P/E's fault, but closing down plants can kill towns for good. The question here is ownership - a family feels some tie to the community to attempt to help their friends and neighbors. P/E absolutely destroys this tie - the subtle but measurable effects compound.
Finally, even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees.
You're right to say that P/E is just playing the market. That doesn't mean that its impact on society has been good - the entire reason we're in the current political and economic situation we are today are by following the 'laws of the market' which have hollowed out the middle class and created a pretty large affordability crisis despite the world having achieved record levels of wealth.
The transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society, and one of the primary reasons we don't 'build' things anymore - it's just not capitally "efficient"
> if private equity is so benign, where do the returns come from?
“During the last 10 years PE on average did not outperform the public markets in aggregate” [1]. (Individual firms overperform, some of them consistently.)
> even if you like P/E as a VEHICLE (which - I would argue it hasn't been a 'good' ones since like the late 90s), you can't ignore the fact that it's returns have largely been eaten by fees
Yup! Though nitpick: we often stop calling it PE when it works. VC is PE. So are Berkshire Hathaway and founder-led “take private” transactions.
> transfer from 'doers' to 'owners' has been a net negative for American society
PE is often an exit vehicle for small builders. Particularly in the space that deals with SBA loans.
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-066_cc5a53f4-...
What are you arguing then? That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing? Hard to argue this is 'good for society!'
> VC returns as an asset class (outside of a handful of firms) have underperformed in the past 20 years. I don't even count it here.
> PE as an exit for small builders Agree. But again, it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time. The employees - typically - don't. Search can help this (because searchers are usually more dependent on employees) so this is a good example of "micro-PE" being generically better than larger scale PE.
> That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing?
You added a bunch of stuff in front which isn’t substantiated as being an effect of private equity or unique to it.
Most complaints about PE tend to boil down to complaints about, in the extreme, private ownership, and in the specific, leverage or non-local control. Those are legitimate complaints that attach to PE. But not necessarily. And in some cases, not in most cases.
> it's the builders who have built over multiple decades who profit (great!) one time
Sure. They get the multiple. They can now build more.
Yes, the stuff I added is anecdotal, but pretty well established from my discussions and observations of high level operators and related service providers (Bain, McKinsey, etc.) LMK if you've ever seen a slide deck in their post-acquisition plans that says "Impact on Community."
The PE complaints are mostly unsophisticated from 'the community' but actually have a very reasonable underpinning - as discussed above.
Finally for builders - this is great. Probably the single best application - but again, cost benefit I'm pretty sure it's not only economic drag, but social drag as well.
Again - the asset class has expanded massively. It's due a reckoning - curious how many firms are actually solvent were they required to sell their holdings in market.
Everything you've said so far has been pretty spot on, however the Bain report says the average fund IRR does outperform the market: https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain-report_g...
IRR comparisons admittedly get a little fuzzy since the lack of liquidity and pegging values is difficult.
You're also correct to say that VC is a subset of PE, technically speaking, colloquially it's not really. If you put VC into the whole mix, then yes the asset class sucks versus the public market. PE is often synonymous with an MBO.
Private equity has rarely done good for investors too.
With the boom of popularity of ETFs in the last decades it has been increasingly hard for active fund managers to justify their costs by investing on public markets where benchmarks are visible and public.
Thus they removed themselves from the benchmark entirely and moved to private equity where there's no benchmark and returns are very hard to gauge.
Analysis shows that:
- The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.
- Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.
- PE performance is extremely murky, as their gains are virtual and whether you exit profitably is heavily dependent on your timing
- The entire sector is ripe with corruption and little regulatory oversight. PEs keep ballooning their holdings valuations by essentially trading companies among themselves. So fund A sells Acme to to fund B at twice the valuation, and will return the favour by buying Foobar at inflated valuation. This all obviously requires access to cheap credit. Many startups are approached by PEs that have already lined up to sell the startup to another PE after few years guaranteeing everybody (from founders to all the PE managers) nice profits, up to the last sucker stuck with the bill.
The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.
Are you referring to Private Equity (as in MBOs/LBOs) or Venture Capital? None of what you're stating is rooted in reality or data. Source: https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain-report_g...
> - The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.
What? No. Read the report:
"Buyout funds continue to outperform public markets in all regions across time horizons longer than five years"
> - Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.
Once again, read the report.
> The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.
I sold my business to PE and I profited nicely. So I'm not sure what you're concluding here...
Take the parent's post with a grain of salt.
Buyouts.
For VC we know there is an edge, but that edge belongs predominantly to the top 4.
I'm concluding that investors thinking that giving their money to a PE fund hoping to have anywhere near the diversification and returns of a simple global market ETF are in for a rude awakening.
Of course you profited nicely, it's who puts the money in the private fund that won't have any chance of beating a very simple global ETF buying your businesses.
And gains in those highly unregulated and illiquid markets (that have insane fees) are what they are: virtual.
In any case I ain't reading a 68 page report, and have no patience for yet another pointless pitch about PE, everything there was to say about PE can be found in this very simple summary by Ben Felix:
https://youtu.be/Ik169Fd_G1E?si=c7a1cu6xC13C0FX6
I mean, their counter-parties know all of this, but the fact that PE assets don't need to be marked to market on a regular basis can be good for a lot of these investors, as it introduces a delay in the spiral that can otherwise occur with public assets.
Like, if AI collapses, everyone's gonna sell Treasuries to cover losses as they are super liquid (mostly), but the PE assets can pretend that they're still worth whatever, thus reducing margin calls.
PE is generally bad, but their LP's are not entirely stupid and the ability to mark to imagination is worth a bunch of money sometimes.
Private equity are the crows of the economy. They pick off weak / dysfunctional businesses and open space for fresh competition (or for other markets to open up).
As far as I’ve seen that’s as far from the truth as it can be. They in fact consolidate terrible businesses, undercut the good ones and drive them out of the market until only they are left, after which point, they get even worse.
From what I've seen, they take a terrible business and liquify its valuable assets for their investors, freeing up capital to be invested more productively elsewhere in the economy. Of course those investors could take the money and commission a bunch of statues of themselves, but frequently they do something more productive than that.
A lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional. They'll dismantle a business that holds a lot of nostalgic value for people, even though it's long since ceased to be a viable and productive company. But it wasn't their fault that the business was in that situation in the first place! Years of mismanagement and neglect or perhaps disruption from a competitor left the business in zombie-like state. PE came along and put it out of its misery rather than allow it to slowly crumble while depreciating the value of its illiquid assets.
> lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional
Mine specifically stems from PE buying up all but one 24x7 emergency vets in a 20 miles radius from me. All of them were thriving businesses. There is only one remaining non PE ones has its days numbered. After monopolizing the emergency vet market, they shut down a few locations, which previously acted as competition for each other, effectively cementing monopolies in those individual neighborhoods as well. Now, you pay $200 to just get your pet checked out and always have to wait anywhere between 6-8 hours in triage if your pet isn’t literally dying, because they are perpetually understaffed and there are no other options. They also recommend unnecessary tests and treatments, present them as “optional” but refuse to treat your pet if you don’t agree to their “optional” treatment plan.
Lots of businesses have big positive externalities [1]. They provide more benefit to their communities than they take in for themselves. Unfortunately, these sorts of businesses are easy pickings for PE.
Artists are a classic example. They generate huge positive externalities for a community while reaping almost none of the benefits for themselves. Artists get severely exploited by the economy for this!
To counteract this problem we need other ways of addressing the positive externalities. In the case of artists, this usually comes in the form of public (and private) patronage and endowments for the arts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive
Man, it's horrible people have such an emotional connection to art and businesses that keep their pets alive. If only we could transform these into an asset that extracted wealth, now that would be great for society! Think of all the externalities!
Sounds like a problem with lack of competition. Would you have been happier if it was a publicly traded company that did it? Amazon health or some such?
What you are describing the best-case scenario. They happen.
What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.
An example: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house
They could do this, but there's not enough targets of this type for the money invested in the sector. They've also proven to not have the advertised & applicable expertise to run companies any more efficiently than current management. Nostalgia had nothing to do with it unless that's one of the company's assets. I've been inside on three PE acquisitions, and 5 sales by PE to new funds. The playbook was the same for them all: predictable, decent cash flow, cut expenses, grow enterprise sales, sell on before long term cracks from lack of strategic investment showed. If anything they accelerated the decline of healthy going concerns, but at each sale the insiders did great.
Crows deliberately spreading plague in order for there to be more corpses to feast on, to take the parent's metaphor further.
But seriously. Are there anyone who hasn't interacted with a business systematically enshittified in one form or another by PE?
If only it actually played out that way[0][1][2][3]
Whatever legal and theoretical role they play in the economy does not match the actual, real role they are playing: PE firms are by and large, economic vampires. They have a well documented history of sucking the life out of a sector at the expense of workers and consumers alike
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/megan-greenwell-bad-company-priv...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-b...
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/private-eq...
[3]: https://doctorow.medium.com/the-long-bloody-lineage-of-priva...
That's not true at all! Funds often look for mature companies with predictable cash flow. They can make returns while also squeezing margins under the illusion of expertise and economies of scale and seek to the next fund for a multiple. They're an alternative to the massive headache of going public and getting a liquidity event, not typically the model for your weak and dysfunctional company.
this would be somewhat arguable as okay except for their introduction into categories like daycare, emergency rooms, drug and alcohol rehab, care homes for the geriatric and disabled, etc. things that probably shouldn’t be profit oriented to begin with yet are and are being snatched up by private equity, worsening outcomes in basically all of them
"shouldn't be profit oriented" is another way to say "costs will quickly grow exponentially", because there's absolutely no incentive not to let them.
Is anyone better off if elderly care becomes too expensive to offer at scale?
1: "Shouldn't be profit oriented"
2: ???
3: "too expensive to offer at scale"
Except that Americans pay far more for these services than places where they aren't profit oriented. Try again. Reality does not support your assertion.
Tell that to former JoAnn Fabrics customers.
They should have paid more for the fabric, I guess. Private equity tends to loot things on the way down. Joann was on the way out regardless.
Lol, the "it's actually good for customers" response is "they should have paid more"? I love it.
Nobody in this comment chain was saying it was good for the customers. The GP was saying that they clear out room for new businesses, and if brick-and-mortar-fabric-superstore were still a viable model someone would be doing it.
I am looking for fabric right now and am terribly frustrated not to have anywhere but limited quilting shops available. Online is not an answer, because you can't handle the fabric for weight, exact color, and stretchiness.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
The lack of customer density over time drove out all the fabric stores - medium sized or not.
At-home sewing has been declining since I've been alive, and it was just barely hanging on when I was a kid. The demographics simply cannot support these stores in most locations outside of hyper-dense cities.
Not to mention the folks who shop for fabric tend to be some of the most cost-conscious consumers around. They are more or less the prototype of a customer who will go to a B&M store and then price match on-line,.
I'm honestly surprised even Jo-anne survived as long as it did.
The "clear out room for new business" argument is as absurd as it gets. If you think the landscape is packed to capacity with brick-&-mortar stores to the point that it needs "room for new business," you don't live in the USA.
How the hell does consolidation, monopolization, externalizing costs and extreme leverage "clear the room for new businesses"?
Even on HN playing the role of PE apologist is not going to fly ...
Consolidation frees up real estate, allowing new businesses to open. Where I live, old supermarkets are now farmers’ markets, trampoline parks, and health clubs, and an old car dealership is a church.
Fantasyland in the house!
They pick on the weak companies but the basic model is to pick over the corpse and leave someone else holding the bag. Make it look good on the surface, leverage it to the hilt, extract cash and let it die.
I think the avian analogy you are looking for are vultures picking at the remains of road kill.
How do I travel to the alternate universe where private equity apparently makes things better instead of worse?
You stay in this one. If PE wasn't producing value it would disappear. What, you think people dump money into PE because they want to twirl their villainous moustaches?
Most people would say that extracting wealth and concentrating it into an ever shrinking group of elites is making the world worse. They do this both from the companies you and I might work for, but more importantly from the markets that have no defenses.
This is a simpleminded parody of how a market works. Competition isn't concentrating wealth, it's driving down prices. The value ultimately flows to the consumers.
When PE salvages a failing enterprise, it's increasing the overall value of that enterprise, even if that means selling off parts that still have value. Those parts are made available to others at prices lower than they otherwise would have had to pay.
Wealth concentration flows from impediments to competition. There is no shortage of PE firms competing for these opportunities.
> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
This is a bit like asking if public equity has ever done anything good for anyone outside of its investors. It really depends on what is meant by "anything good."
Has any company that has taken venture capital (a variety of private equity) ever done anything good for anyone outside the VCs?
Private equity is more often associated with late stage takeovers and reorganizations than with startups, however. An example might be the privatization and refocus of Dell. Was a refreshed Dell good for its workforce and customers?
https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/private-equity/the-lea...
If you're a Dell customer, Michael Dell taking the company private again seems to have done wonders for them.
Dell has been a publicly traded company again since 2018.
In general I have a pretty negative view of private equity. However I did see this awhile back that seems at least partially positive: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/private-equity-giant-kkrs-an...
I assume you're asking this rhetorically and just want people to affirm how 'evil' private equity is to support the narrative-driven belief you already have?
PE became a favorite journalist boogeyman in the 80s for saddling companies with high interest debt they could never repay or slicing up industrial companies and selling for parts. That's not reality today. A vast majority of private equity buyouts nobody ever hears about or cares about because everything turns out totally fine.
A private equity buyout that makes the company worse off, destroys customer trust, kills employee loyalty, and leaves room for competitors to swoop in is a failed private equity buyout. If that were true in the majority of cases the entire PE model wouldn't work at all.
Here's just a few success stories of companies you've heard of (there's thousands you haven't heard of, so no point in bringing them up).
- Hilton Hotels - Dunkin Brands - Beats by Dre - Dominos Pizza - Petsmart / Chewy
Businesses that sell to private equity are often businesses that are not doing well or are not long-term sustainable, hence why the owner wants to sell. Think about it logically. If you're running a fantastic business that is profitable, growing, sustainable, with happy employees -- why would you sell?? Or in the case of public companies being taken private, why would anybody take the risk if everything is going wonderfully?
Why is private equity different from any other form of organization? Publicly traded companies are even more addicted to getting revenue. Non-profits like universities may not have shareholders, but somehow the price of tuition keeps skyrocketing even faster than the prices at the dollar stores. And it's not like the religious charities have been pure.
In theory it helps people who have some sort of trade and just want to do that trade, focus on that, while the business experts from the PE firm handle the business side. Running a business is a skill, and people who want to sell some other skill often don't have it as you can't be good at everything.
Are there other ways of addressing that gap, like hiring experts? Sure, but its not like PE is entirely evil.
Keep in mind there is some selection bias here. You only hear about private equity when its being comic book evil. When things work out or its a non scummy PE company, you never hear about it.
It seems to offer interesting opportunities for young recent high level MBA's.
If you have a pension, you're an investor in PE. If you live in a country with a sovereign wealth fund, you're a beneficiary of PE. If you're connected to a school with an endowment, a lot of that money ends up in PE funds, and can fund lots of research and student resources.
So ya, I'd agree the PE is rarely good for anyone but the investors, but you'd be surprised how many people are investors without realizing it.
If all of those things never invested a cent in private equity funds that buy up existing companies to turn the screws on their customers and put the money into new business creation instead, they wouldn't be making any less money and the whole world would be better off, including the investors themselves in their role as customers and employees.
vc, private equity; potayto, potahto
I can't think of a single example. It normally means making a company worse whilst relying on existing name recognition to drive sales with the aim of re-selling it before people realise how bad the company has begun.
So I work in commercial real estate, obviously a large private equity influenced industry. I've worked in REPE and in other capacities.
There's degrees of PE. Some good, fine, and some worse.
Take real estate development. It's probably one of the suckiest businesses to be in. I know 3 developers who have committed suicide because when things go wrong, your entire life collapses (you put up all your assets in order to obtain construction loans). The litigation, brain damage, and risks are enormous. Increasingly, the payoff is awful (due to worsening legislation and NIMBYism and worse market condiditions)
However, private equity in development I think is a good thing. When there are investors willing to put this money at risk, we get much needed construction of housing (see Austin, TX where rents are falling off a cliff due to over building).
Now look at Los Angeles, which new permits are literally almost non-existent because LA is one of the most hostile places for developers. You can't make money in LA, so there's no capital available.
Then you end up with "affordable" housing developers adding the only supply at $600-900k/unit costs vs the market rate developer at $300-600k/unit.
----
On the other hand, "value add" private equity is much more suspicious. It's more cut throat, easier to end up in crony capitalist situations by operating with a "cut expenses, provide less, make big bucks" model. The people in this world are the kind of guys who have never done anything hard with their hands other than gotten a sore thumb from pounding too hard on their keyboards to adjust their excel model ("Mr. The Model is Always Right") too hard all night long.
This is how we end up with old properties who get flipped 4x each being sold with "upside the seller was too stupid to take advantage of" and ending up in situations where tenants get priced out due to private equity seeking infinite growing returns. Oh and by the way, every previous owner did "lipstick on the pig" jobs because why not try to save costs and make your levered IRR 16% instead of 12%? You cannot show that kind of return when you promised 18%... then it'll make it harder to fundraise your next deal!
This isn't to say that "value add" is a dirty business. We certainly need to balance the incentive to modernize and renovate properties. An d developers overbuilding isn't always a good thing.
So its nuanced. I think people need to fairly give credit that there are both good and bad. The capital efficiency is real and produces real world outcomes since there is a strong financial incentive at the end of the door.
But financial incentives sometimes bump up to issues causing harm in real life, which need to be recognized and called out.
Not yet. Sometimes employees if they get second bite of the big apple. PE do well in capital-intensive sectors. I'm not sure if their playbook fits the real needs of dollar stores. Instead of focusing on things like debt and aggressive cost cuts, most customers just want fair prices, stocked shelves, clean stores, friendly cashiers and basic respect—things that PE firms often ignore. In DFW, I was surprised to see 1-2 person dollar stores!
To me, that is an utterly hilarious question to be posing on this website of all places.
That's a good point. Private Equity is a fairly broad umbrella term that encompasses a variety of investment strategies and business models.
The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter. These "investors" are a blight on society, this activity should be criminalized, they should be in prison.
But there are a lot of well-meaning investors who do great things for society that also get stuck with the same label.
Just like crows! People hate crows even though they play a valuable role in ecosystems.
I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them.
I would love to hear some counterexamples though. Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
> Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
You have way too much (unneeded) limiting qualifications. In Netherlands PE have bought loads of companies, then put the acquisition price as a loan on the balance sheet. Plus then sold the assets, made the company then lease those assets. Then those companies often went bankrupt as the leasing prices increased crazily.
> I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society.
The companies I've cited weren't "extremely unproductive and inefficient". Businesses can be profitable and healthy without all the qualifications you think they need.
Do they do actual damage, or is this egghead economic theory?
Red Lobster?
Weren't they losing money for years on all-you-can-eat seafood specials [1]?
It's not uncommon in the fast food business to be breaking even or losing money on all aspects of the business while the true value of the company, its real estate portfolio, steadily grows. The fact that investors decided they wanted to cash out should be a surprise to no one.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91129776/what-really-killed-red-...
> The type of Private Equity that most here are referring to is the type that buys up existing businesses, squeezes as much money as possible out of them, and throws their desecrated corpses in the gutter.
And this type of PE represents a very small minority of what is actually considered "Private Equity". The vast majority of PE deals are about growth. This small minority of asset stripping PE groups gets the most headlines though.
Source: my firm works with ~400 PE firms.
Valve is private equity and seems to do a lot of good things, for gamers and for Linux users in general.
> Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane.
Dollar Tree and Dollar General are publicly traded.
So Family Dollar might be the result of PE tactics, but the other two aren't, and Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar because they saw it as under-performing.
It's actually sort of weird Dollar Tree couldn't make it work. I know the dollar stores all have somewhat different businesses, but you'd think that Dollar Tree could have either turned Family Dollar around or knew it was selling a loser (see the market for lemons) to PE.
And this is exactly why I only shop at Costco. While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.
Buying in bulk is about having the ability to both afford next week’s food this week and have the means to store it. Not to mention the annual subscription.
Responding to a comment about dollar stores preying on the poor with, “that’s why I shop at Costco” is… a choice.
The fact that the strategic wedge with which a successful, relatively socially-positive business manages to sustain itself isn't universally accessible doesn't negate its value.
The Venn diagram between people who shop at dollar stores and people who shop at Costco isn't empty.
> the ability to both afford next week’s food this week
At minimum that's everyone on a normal paycheck, paid every two weeks. There are situations where someone couldn't get together a few days' pay at once, but that's a tiny fraction of situations.
And the means to store most food is a two foot square of space in a room somewhere. And then most of the rest fits in the empty fridge space you already have.
And there are deals there that can be useful for your wallet right away. This isn't something where you have to put up a ton of money for months before you benefit.
The biggest issue is probably that costco isn't easy to get to.
For me it's very simple: What I save on glasses pays for my membership. I don't go all that often but it's still worthwhile.
This is true, but a valuable - and damning - observation that this variation in business model, that seems to be both decent and profitable, is so rare
... and a car to haul all that stuff, and time to drive to the nearest Costco.
It really is a luxury that a ton of people can't afford.
Time to go and acquire necessary food stuff is not a luxury in any reasonable framing. What is the alternative, eating drive-thru every day or having Instacart deliver overpriced groceries?
I believe eating food from street vendors was the usual way for paupers until quite recently. Recall that it was common to rent a bed for a few hours and share it with someone who worked different shifts.
Indeed. And I say this as Costco member. There are lot of factors that make Costco memberships work. And a lot of people won't be able to make much benefit out of Costco membership.
I say this as someone who admires their business model and how they treat customers & employees: your typical Costco experience is drive to the suburbs, spend $500 and load up your car with nice to have food products and discretionary purchases. Poorer people cannot do any of these things.
Why is car a luxury? A clunker car worth $2000 will still work fine for years with minor maintenance that can be done by yourself.
Oh, yeah. Cities. Cars are expensive when you live in a 100 sq. ft. box.
Perhaps that's what is causing problems?
The $2000 daily driver died with covid.
The cost of the car itself is minimal compared to insurance, gas and storage costs.
What "storage"? You put it on your driveway. The minimum liability insurance around here is about $50 a month.
Some people do not own a driveway or a car space. There is an active rental market just for that.
A competently planned city makes car ownership unnecessary.
There's no way to plan a city so most people can walk to a Costco. Warehouse stores are an inherently car-based phenomenon.
They don't require everyone to own a car. At the very least, they can run an efficient delivery service. And there's got to be a way to make a 3 hour rental or single taxi drive once a month much cheaper than owning a car.
Sprawl comes from urban planning. I think you mean to say a certain approach to planning makes it unnecessary.
A competently planned _country_ makes cities that only seem to create generational poverty unnecessary.
not sure your comment is any less insufferable.
>While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.
This doesn't make any sense. Costco makes a profit on the goods sold as well. They have every incentive to sell you as much stuff as possible. That's why they also engage in the usual retail tactics to increase sales, like having the essentials all the way in the back of the store, and putting the high margin items (electronics and jewelry) in the front. They might practice a more cuddlier form of capitalism than dollar general, but they're still a for profit retail business.
I see you're not terribly familiar with Costco. Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco and they keep markups on items at no more than 14% over cost (15% for Kirkland brand).
So yes, Costco does make most of its profit by ensuring customers are happy and continue to renew their memberships every year.
>Membership fees account for the vast majority of net operating income for Costco
This is financially illiterate because you're mixing revenue ("membership fees") with profit ("net operating income"). While it might be tempting to assume that membership fees is pure profit for them, it's not, because people only buy memberships because they're useful for something (ie. shopping at their stores). Therefore you can't strip that out from the other costs associated with operating a chain of warehouses.
It’s kind of a meme; Costco’s profits are almost exactly the same as their total revenue from membership fees, which leads people to think that the warehouses run at zero margin and the fees are their only profit source. The fees certainly give them room to run the sales at extremely low margins (though large grocers like Kroger only have something like 3% margins), but it wouldn’t take a huge shift in purchasing patterns to change this coincidence. If all the people who don’t use their membership that much dropped them and those who use them were all large-scale buyers, they would have to increase their prices just to give themselves a bit of cushion.
It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.
I much prefer this to stores that are happy to burn customers, never expecting to see them again.
>It seems to amount to a similar principle, that their business model depends on repeat customers, and would fail if they lost trust.
You think dollar general is making $37.9B (in 2023) of annual revenue from one-off customers? Unless you're operating a tourist trap, or some sort of business that people only need a few times in their lifetimes (eg. real estate agents), most businesses rely on repeat customers.
Dollar stores around here pop up in small towns, killing off any locally-owned competition, and are far enough away from the big chains to mean they can charge quite a bit more while offering terrible service.
No, I think they have other advantages that are less attractive to me.
I have money to buy in bulk, care about quality, and am willing to make longer trips to stock up. The membership is trivial relative to annual groceries.
I think think the target market for dollar stores is the opposite
Note how they tend to have captive customers.
Oh gee aren't you cute. Costco's entire cost of doing business are covered purely by their sale of goods. The memberships are pure icing on the cake. It's not wrong to look at it this way.
Counter example: they sell their dollar hotdog and pop right at the front!
The sad thing is, people in rural areas that depend on places like Dollar General, and are getting fleeced blame everyone but republicans and they are usually in red areas
I’ll bite…
I live in a rural area with a Dollar General about a half mile from my neighborhood. For staples, it’s honestly fine. You want a 6 pack and some hot dog buns because you missed it in the Wal-Mart run the other day (15 miles away), it’s great!
You’re not getting fleeced and if you are, the gas savings alone more than make up for it (0.65 per mile per the IRS.)
For folks who depend on the local DG for, idk, clothes and household goods it might be much worse, I don’t shop for those there ever, but on staples it’ll do, especially given the density of stores compared to major chains.
The problem is that they drive out local grocery stores that were actually pretty good, have terrible safety records, and food sanitation.
Last Week Tonight did an episode on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Being in a shopping rich area, I have some luxury of choosing what I get where. DG is a good option for a small list of items, about ½% of my shopping.
But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
Having moved from a shopping rich environment of some 30 years to a very rural setting, I was innately trained to hate on Dollar General by my 15 years on HN. In reality, it’s a trade off. Nothing more, nothing less. Whereas before you might have fallen back on a country-store with a small kitchen and minor staples (eggs, cheese, milk) next to the RedBull most folks now have a wider variety of options at a price point comparable to or better than that filling station. All the better, DG has rolled out their “Market” concept with fresh options as well.
At this point I’d love to see a conversation about price points and convenience of a Japanese conbini as compared to a Japanese supermarket on HN. Far less politicized and denigrated I would hope.
> But it'd be awful if my best shopping option was 15mi away.
In much of the rural US, 15mi away is having your good shopping close by. A lot of areas make due with their "best shopping option" being well more than 15mi away.
Yes 15 miles for good shopping sounds pretty nice. I'd say I've got it fairly good for being rural - only 23 miles to the nearest Walmart. That town isn't really great shopping though.
My best shopping option is about 50mi away.
It's worth it, because my only neighbor is about 1/4 mile away, and he's the most reliable person I've ever met.
I don't lock my doors, the keys are in all my trucks.
We do have thieves, who are small and furry, and make off with my figs and tomatoes.
I don't miss your shopping rich area. It's a chore I suffer through.
Anyway, DG can save me about an hour of driving vs Walmart or the normal grocery.
The concept of "small convenience store near me" isn't the problem. The problem is that these stores are actively engaging in outright fraud. People who shop there are absolutely getting fleeced regardless of how much gas they burn getting to the store that's regularly ripping them off.
Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.
If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.
I’m telling you from living “here” - you see just as many stories of major chains getting popped as you do the ever so scapegoatable DG chain.
I have no stock in the firm, this is just lazy feel god torch wielding here.
Here’s Target getting popped all the same: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article289980944....
Your article lists a few instances of target in an area failing at rates like 9% or 2.67%. The Guardian article shows dollar stores all over the place caught thousands of times and getting error rates like 76% 68% and 58%. One dollar store in Utah was caught cheating their customers in 28 inspections in a row! Maybe the News & Observer could have dug deeper into the Targets in your area and found violations of a similar scale, but they didn't, so from the information we have these are extremely different circumstances.
If Target (or whatever the hell a Sheetz is) were ripping off their customers to the same extent that these dollar stores have been doing it then they should also face meaningful consequences for that.
> They already run on a thin-staff, high-volume model.
Like every other retail business not targeting the top 5%.
And Dollar Tree and Dollar General are both publicly listed companies, not private equity.
Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar for $1B 10 years after buying it for $8.5B, a pretty big loss. Dollar Tree’s market cap is $25B, so a pretty negligible part of the national dollar store business is “private equity”.
Costco
Costco's revenue comes from their membership fees and their ability to strongarm suppliers to give them favorable terms (eg. Costco is one of the largest alcohol importers in the US and tends to strongarm LVMH).
I love Costco (I practically grew up at Costco as a kid), but their ICP is not the kind of person who shops at Dollar General or is on SNAP - it's very much targeted at the 50th percentile income bracket and above [0].
And this is why PE has taken over the dollar market segment - because it's a trash business that no one else wants to service over the long term. PE is basically the last resort if a business cannot raise capital from traditional avenues, and leadership and investors want to exit. For y'all graybeards think of "Sam Vimes Boots theory".
Mine Safety Disclosures did a great overview on Costco's operating model a couple years ago [1].
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/how-costco-sams-club-shopper...
[1] - https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2018/6/18/costco
Costco purposefully targets the upper middle class to nearly the point of exclusion of everyone else. By charging membership fees, product selection, and the bulk pricing.
They could care less about the bottom 50% of the market.
Here's how shitty of a business person I am: I had no idea that the poor were a "market" you could prey upon.
Somehow I thought that if I presented a business plan that began, "Our target audience are those living paycheck to paycheck…" that I would be quickly shown the door.
Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.
The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.
It’s an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the aggregate unfortunately.
Paid For By Poor Folks (PFBPF)
When the goal isn't to run a good store but to extract value as fast as possible, all the classic PE patterns show up
Then why doesn't some other established brand open in the same area and undercut them?
> cosplaying as poverty relief
Does it really? Who says this, and who believes it?
>> cosplaying as poverty relief
> Does it really? Who says this
(search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s.)
ref: https://www.dollargeneral.com/hereforwhatmatters>we’re here to provide affordable and convenient access [...]
You'd have to be incredibly naive to interpret that as "poverty relief".
That's how every super market or grocery store in the entire world would describe their business.
> search engine: 22 relevant results in 0.85s.
Being able to understand what those results mean is the important part.
I mean, it's in the name.
You’d have to explain why you believe that. Just because someone in poverty can afford to purchase items in the store, doesn’t mean it’s good value, i.e. it’s not necessarily providing relief from poverty. In fact, it’s the opposite. See e.g. “How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices”:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
Interesting. The Netherlands is no class society so rich or poor nobody has any goddamn shame to stand in line at the Action checkout if there's a good sale to be had.
Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot. Strange country.
I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldi (in the US). There’s plenty of Teslas, BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot (although late model Hondas, Toyotas and Kias are probably the most prevalent). Turns out people of all income brackets like saving money.
> The Netherlands is no class society
Americans used to claim this too. It’s invariably false. It just means that the wealthiest people do a better job of concealing, or not advertising, how vast the wealth discrepancy between them and the average person is.
> Seeing people in BMWs at the Aldi parking lot
The least wealthy person on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_by_net_worth could afford 10,000 high-end BMWs and still be extremely wealthy, far too wealthy to have any interest in lining up at Aldi’s for a sale.
Makes me wonder if the right way to help lower classes is to give them some space (association, platform) to meet and solve issues on their own terms so nobody tries to leech from them.
Family Dollar isn't a dollar store though.
Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine.
How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses.
So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio.
And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.
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private equity is a tumor on this country. it seems any business stained with this actively becomes worse for the customer for as long as possible.
Kudos! This is beautifully succinct, elegant, and accurate writing.
Massachusetts has a quite prominent law against this.
"When buying groceries—food and non-alcoholic beverages, pet food or supplies, disposable paper or plastic products, soap, household cleaners, laundry products, or light bulbs—you must be charged the lowest displayed price, whether on the sticker, scanner, website, or app.
If the lowest price you saw for an item is $10 or less, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, the first item should be FREE. If the lowest price you saw for an item is more than $10, and that lowest price is not what you were charged or not what appeared on the in-aisle price scanner, you should receive $10.00 off the first item."
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/consumer-pricing-accuracy-...
Not to say it's not happening in a Mass based Dollar Stores but you could be walking away with a lot of free stuff and it would be enough of a deterrent to stomp out the practice. I've had it happen at grocery stores usually at their suggesting.
Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for. You couldn't just walk out of the store with the items. You'd need to either:
1. Buy the items and sue.
2. Take the items without paying, likely get the police called on you, and defend yourself in criminal and civil court.
3. Point at the sign, which is posted at every register, and ask for your discount. If they say no you ask for the manager. I've done this several times, and never had an issue (but sometimes it takes a little while).
Theoretically there is a third option, stay in the store near the cash register and call the police to come deal with it on the spot before the purchase. The problem is that they probably won't bother coming, and if they do, they won't come quickly enough to make it worth waiting for them given the amount of money at stake.
Edit: Yeah, I did say before the purchase, but I should have said after the purchase when they pay the legally correct price but the store accuses them of shoplifting and tries to detain them. And I know it's often infeasibly hard to pay the legally correct price from a logistical perspective without the cashier's cooperator, especially if you want to pay with a card. It is clearly possible to put at least the right amount of cash on the counter, ask for the change, and attempt to leave if they refuse, but that doesn't guarantee ever getting the change. Anyway, I did list this option as (purely) theoretical and not as actually practical.
Just refuse the price and walk out, closing the checkout lane while they put everything back on the shelf. Announce loudly what you are doing. Take some friends to do it in other checkout lanes
this is a tort not a criminal act - cops wouldn't/couldn't do anything.
In a lot of places in the US, the lower of the shelf price and the scanner price is by law the most they can demand, at least for retail sales to consumers. Attempts to stop the customer from leaving after having paid the legally appropriate amount would be criminal acts by the store, no?
Have you seen the cops here though? Good luck trying to argue it when they’re loving you up for “shoplifting”. They’re going to side with the store.
I did call it a theoretical option and not a practical option. Although they might be a little more sympathetic to someone who is white, in a business suit, has a photo of the shelf price on their phone, can confirm that a surveillance camera captured them paying the shelf price, and is lucky enough to either get a cop who knows about the local price accuracy law or can point the cop to a visible posted sign about the law in the store.
Not to mention that cops only have powers to arrest/issue tickets, not to adjudicate disputes. This isn't Judge Dredd where cops can mete out judgements as they see fit. That's the whole reason why we have courts and judges.
It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail. Many places legislate that the lower of shelf or scanner price be the maximum price charged.
>It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
> When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need.
Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.
> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.
There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.
Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.
> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.
I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
>There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor)
Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
> Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.
> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.
> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.
But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.
To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.
(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)
Call the police to come deal with...mispriced items? That's not the job of police, sorry. Not in the US anyway.
Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer to leave with their purchase after the customer pays the legally mandated maximum price which is often the lower of shelf and scanner price, yes. That's not going to be a high enforcement priority for the police, but it's absolutely a crime if the store does that.
>Call the police to stop a store from criminally restraining the freedom of a customer [...]
Realistically no store is going chase after the customer for that, but that doesn't mean the average shopper is going to risk arrest/banned (for what the store essentially sees as shoplifting) to send a $2 message over the price difference. And all of this assumes your novel legal theory is actually correct.
It's not a novel legal theory, But yeah, I did call it a theoretical option, not a practical one. I don't pretend that it's practical.
Your original idea of "paying the marked (lower) price, walking away, even if the cashier corrected you with the higher price" certainly is novel. Otherwise can you link any sort of judicial ruling or even a random lawyer that agrees with you?Otherwise this looks suspiciously similar to all the spurious legal theories that sovereign citizens have, about how they don't need a drivers license because they're "traveling" or whatever.
I said the legally maximum price is often the lower price. NYC is an example with a law about this:
https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/consumers/10-things-consumer.pa...
Similar laws exist at the state level in NY, in other NY counties, and in several other states and subdivisions of other states across the country.
In that case, the higher charge is clearly illegal (no novel theory needed), so standard contract law theory could consider the terms of the buyer's offer to purchase to be the terms of the invitation to treat in the absence of legal contrary terms offered at checkout. I guess it's possible that the court would say that the store never agreed to sell the item at all by demanding an illegal price instead of being considered to have accepted the buyer's offer on the posted terms, but there's only so much tolerance a judge would have for that kind of defense by the store - after all, it's very likely that the customer would have an unjust enrichment claim against the store for the amount of the overcharge if they were to pay the illegal higher price, and that wouldn't be true if the illegal contract term were valid.
The precise answer may vary by state based on judicial precedents about illegal terms in contractual counteroffers following an offer to buy made pursuant to an invitation to treat.
None of this is practical for almost any chain dollar store overpricing victim to pursue, but I am just talking theoretically here.
Call the cops to come deal with someone threatening to make a false police report about you.
> this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for
Massachusetts has a strong consumer arm at its AGO [1] and consumer regulator [2].
The problem is less one of cost of litigation than education about available options. (And the time to pursue them.)
[1] https://www.mass.gov/how-to/file-a-consumer-complaint
[2] https://www.mass.gov/orgs/office-of-consumer-affairs-and-bus...
If you walk out and it goes to court you will surely lose. You may have started with the right to get it for nothing but you cannot realize that right by force. Self-help is almost always illegal in any case of disagreement between parties.
Yeah, but someone living paycheck-to-paycheck and shopping at dollar stores is likely not someone who can afford filing a lawsuit.
If it’s common enough it sounds like it could be some fun pastime for lawyers.
> Unfortunately, this type of conflict can only be adjudicated by courts, which low-income people don't have the time and money for.
Here in Europe, we have consumer protection agencies. Get wronged? Shoot them off an email and they'll take care of it. And overcharging at the cash register? That gets handled by the responsible authorities. Again, call them, tell them what happened and it can get real messy real fast.
I was having trouble getting Verizon to unlock an iPhone that had been purchased (not financed) from Best Buy and that had been on Verizon's network for more than two years. Verizon support said only BB could unlock it[^1]. I thought that was poppycock. I filled out a form on the FCC's web site just before midnight. By 8 AM, the FCC had forwarded the complaint to Verizon. By 9 AM Verizon executive relations called me. 30 minutes later the phone was unlocked.
Which is all to say, for some things, the US also has consumer protection and it's great when it works.
[^1]: Apparently only Apple sells unlocked iPhones. iPhones purchased at other retailers carrier-lock themselves at activation. At least on Verizon they're supposed to automatically unlock after 60 days. When that doesn't happen, you get stuck in Verizon's mindless customer support swamp[^2,^3].
[^2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bestbuy/comments/17ae8l2/verizon_sa...
[^3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bestbuy/comments/1buemp5/why_is_it_...
Yeah, I've had a similar experience with a phone company trying to hold a number hostage. Yes, the bill was unpaid, but I was not the one liable. (My phone on a company account, the company was going under.) Letter to the regulators, very promptly fixed.
I bet you didn’t try that this year when every single part of the federal government is actively trying to harm people.
We have such agencies over here as well. Most states have some sort of weights and measures agency that handles inaccurate price scanning complaints.
I can't say how effective they are at remediating small figure issues, but no company wants to hear from them regardless.
We have those agencies as well. They've been steadily gutted since their inception, and the courts (well, the Court) don't care.
You may be referring to the CFPB but states tend to have their own agencies that have nothing to do with SCOTUS or the federal government.
And yet, here we are, with the terrible state of affairs for consumers.
You live in Massachusetts and speak from experience? Because this law seems to work quite well in MA as it's a particularly popular law.
Not only that, but they post a sign about this at every register. (That must be required.) So you can point to the sign. I think a typical store manager would comply. Maybe I'm not cynical enough.
Yup. My local Star Market was pretty bad about this, so I started paying close attention to prices on the shelf and at the register. Pretty soon I was taking home free items every shopping trip. (I also reported them to Inspectional Services when aisle scanners were broken or prices were particularly egregiously missing or wrong.)
Some of the cashiers had to have it explained to them with much pointing to the sign that hangs on every register; others knew the drill and called a manager over right away.
After about 6 months they started shaping up. Maybe the store manager got fed up, or maybe corporate stopped having them skimp on sticker hygiene.
From the article:
> In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing, given appropriate incentive and enforcement. In particular I noticed that this really varies from store to store, even in the same chain.
> ...but in my experience, they're perfectly capable of doing the right thing
It's both true. Given that a typical store can have thousands of SKUs displayed, mistakes will _always_ happen once in a while. A forgotten price tag, an incorrect sale price, etc.
But at the same time, stores are more than capable of having a system to _fix_ these issues as soon as they are detected. It doesn't even take much, just a way for a cashier to flag an inconsistent price for someone at the back office.
Exactly. A mistake here and there is fine. Dollar Store is clearly on another level.
So this means I would get the app-only sale price, without using the app?
While doing some research into state retail pricing laws a few years ago, I discovered how tough Massachusetts is, being one of the last holdouts mandating ticketing on all items, and only relenting in exchange for price scanners every so many aisles. Living in Pennsylvania and annoyed by stores tying their best prices to their apps, I fancifully emailed Elizabeth Warren, asking if she'd prod a friend in state government to consider a legislative end run around apps. I had no idea such a law really existed. "First in the nation" I expect. Wonder how long it's been around?
Probably doesn’t apply for most app pricing, since those are typically advertised as “digital coupons” or the like in the fine print.
I can’t help imagining that the likelihood of successfully arguing for a free product with a DG cashier is slim to none.
What's interesting is how uneven the landscape is across states
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.
Surely, now that this made the news, there will be an investigation into the fraudulent behavior of Dollar General and Family Dollar.
Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)
It was investigated, the issue is that the fines are smaller than the profit. I would personally want to see things like this considered fraud and that it can result in prison sentences for executives and other people invovled in the decision making.
Ya the problem needs to be a fine the first time, second time it’s fraud. Allow for honest mistakes. Punish for clearly defrauding customers. We really need jail time for execs making these decisions but that rarely happens.
Corporate fines should all be percentages of profits.
Pretty trivial to make profits "not exist" though if you planned to engage in fraud and wanted to de-risk it.
They're a publicly traded company. If they drop profits substantially, I imagine shareholders etc would leave.
I'm pretty sure GP was suggesting a general enforcement framework, not talking about any particular company.
Anyway no, shareholders care about much more than simple profits.
Explain, please.
I ask because I've never invested in a company that wasn't very profitable. I'm trying to find out besides intense insider information why someone would. (I'm not VC clearly, just a retail investor.)
Explain how people care about more than just profitability?
If they didn't, everyone would be invested in the single most profitable company on the market, which they're not.
There are unprofitable companies people are perfectly willing to buy.
Growth, absolute revenue, rates of rates of change are all relevant depending on what you care about.
All the above. Plus it is absurdly simple to manipulate profit up or down.
For example, as an owner, I can be paid a bonus, or not. Crumbs, I can be paid a salary or not. If I want profits high, I simply take a low salary and no bonus. Or vice versa if I want profits low.
But that's the tip of the iceberg. Buying an asset this year, depreciated over the next 5, means higher profit this year, and 4 years of lower profit.
Marketing expenses this year, benefits next year, and so on. Drop the head count to juice profits for a couple years, raise head count to drop it, and do on.
Profits are the easiest thing to manipulate and hence the worst metric for fines. Which is why you see Europe use Revenue (not profit) as the measure for some fines.
Yep, not to mention what you can do with complex conglomerates. For example, one should take a look at the intra-company eliminations that the giant pay-viders do (e.g. UnitedHealthGroup, owner of insurer/payer UnitedHealth and healthcare provider Optum)
Insurers are margin-capped, but wouldn't you know it once you own a PBM and the providers, you can make revenue, holdings, pricing power, and market share rise arbitrarily while never producing a profit beyond the cap.
This is why GDPR fines, say, are a percentage of _revenue_. Harder to mess with without getting into outright fraud.
Yeah agreed this seems more directionally correct.
Or revenue?
If movie contracts are any lesson, you always want to be on the gross. Too many ways to game the system otherwise.
And that only works because the theatres aren’t controlled by the producers. Revenue recognition is its own field of ripe fuckery.
God yes
Percentage of global tärevwbue works. We know that from GDPR. But I would personally prefer prison sentences for the execs.
Revenue, not profit.
You want prison sentences for execs if you were charged $1.50 for a can of corn instead of $1.45? Surely you can't be serious.
If there’s a paper trail showing they authorized it, and the total amount of fraud is enough for felony charges (a few thousand bucks, I think), then yeah, throw their asses in prison, and make them refund the money they had the business steal out of their personal funds.
I’m all for limited liability corporations, but if there is a smoking gun that shows you intentionally engaged in criminal activity, that should pierce the liability shield.
Do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specifically said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says? Chances are, in the world of computers and automation, mis-pricing just happens. Its a chance we all take as consumers. You just have to be mindful when shopping.
For all intents and purposes “mispricing” doesn’t just happen widely. This is a policy problem with the stores. The difference between an accident and fraud is intent - it’s pretty clear there’s systemic intent here.
> do you honestly believe a senior exec at a company specially said to charge the customer more than what the price on the shelf says
Yes. I 100% believe that a policy from management of a retail chain owned by PE would say “charge the till price not the sticker price”, and also separately “our policy is to ensure all prices are consistent by doing a price audit of every stickered item once per 6 months”. All that does is allegedly ensure they’re not ripping people off two days a year.
Why, yes, I actually do. Just like BMW execs specifically instructed engineers to cheat at emissions testing.
And last time I checked, you don't get to just say "oopsie woopsies, I only accidentally committed fraud of a mass scale exclusively in a way that benefits me for a prolonged period of time that would obviously show up on books and intentionally hid it until caught" and get out of punishment.
If I break the law, I get arrested. Or am I allowed to "accidentally" try to carry out a new PC from Best Buy several times in a row?
I don't know about you, but shopping at major grocery stores I have rarely been mischarged and I check my receipts/final price pretty religiously. If Dollar Tree consistently overcharges people then there should be an investigation, discovery and jail time if they willingly enable fraud. And given that this entire thread is about how they frequently overcharge people I think it matters.
If it’s being done systematically, and, er, well, it certainly sounds like there’s a case to be answered there, then, well, why not, after a proper trial?
Like, imagine if your bank randomly took a few percent extra off each transaction. Someone would get in a lot of trouble for that, and at a certain point “we’re not doing fraud, we’re just staggeringly incompetent” won’t cut it.
Why is incarceration suddenly not an appropriate possible punishment for theft if it is done by someone in a suit. These are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars being swindled from poor people. Not a single 5 cent mistake as you try to make it out to be.
If you really believe 5 cent transactions never amount to significant consequences why don't you send me 5 cents a million times.
OK, and the next time you defraud your employer by $0.05 (take a longer break then needed, arrive late to work, etc) then you should spend the rest of your days in prison. Fair is fair, right?
You're really missing the point here. If I defrauded a million companies for $0.05 yeah throw me in prison. If Dollar Tree defrauded a single customer of $0.05 that's very different than doing it millions of times.
Some people say it's trickery, but when I apply the razor I find pricing errors more likely to be the result of stupidity than of malice.
Having worked in retail myself, I understand that some days there just isn't time to get it all done. A debt of unfinished tasks can accumulate. It happens. Sometimes old prices get left up. (I think the stupidity is on the part of management more than it is the employees, but it's still more stupid than it is malicious.)
---
Dollar General got into the thick of it with the Ohio Attorney General a couple of years ago[1] over this issue: The prices on the shelf didn't always match the prices at the register. Stores were closed[2] while they updated their price tags to match reality.
And as part of the settlement with the Ohio AG: Nowadays, when I go into a Dollar General and Red Baron pizzas are on the shelf for $5 and they ring up at $7.65, they're required to honor the posted price of $5 when I bring this up to them.
(That last bit really should be enshrined in law instead of the footnotes of a legal settlement with a single entity, but alas: It just isn't that way in Ohio.)
[1]: https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Media/Newsletters/Consum...
[2]: https://www.supermarketnews.com/foodservice-retail/ohio-ag-d...
I would like to think incompetence as well, but when the problem is this widespread, IMHO it does point to a corporate issue...even if that's simply leaving too many incompetent managers in charge. IMHO if you're the manager and the part-time teenager didn't finish updating all the shelf pricing, then it's on you to finish before going home. But today too many people just don't give a damn.
My first job was in retail as well, going back to the days before scanners when every item item was ticketed individually. When something goes on sale you ticket it again, then tear off the sale price stub when the sale ends. Repeat as needed. Maybe that could be a suitable punishment, too? Force stores to abandon shelf pricing for a period of time until it hurts enough that they get their act in order?
Where I live the rule is simple, and all stores adopted it.
If something is mislabeled you get (one of) free, and all the rest at the lower price. (And you see a worker skurry off to fix it immediately.)
And here's a shock, mislabelling is vanishingly rare... seems it can be done if desired...
Hanlon's Razor is not relevant with large amounts of money at stake. in fact the complete opposite is the best approach: The more money that's involved, the more you should suspect malice until it has been conclusively ruled out.
As a company seeking to maximize profit, why would you fix this problem? It seems optimal to say "it's out of our control" -- you get to overcharge customers, and you have a reasonable explanation if a lawsuit comes.
I would be curious to see how often it's the other way around, e.g. they undercharge a customer.
I prefer to think that people (including those who run corporations at the level of -- you know -- price tags) are broadly more incompetent than they are malicious, dishonest, replete scumbags who would sooner stab a person in the back and take their wallet than give them the time of day.
It is possible that I am wrong about this.
I agree that people are usually good, but systems will be abused.
The first think I thought of was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...
You're applying that razor incorrectly. These dollar stores are run with a skeleton crew, where it's impossible for the workers to keep the store in order, or to update the prices on the shelves. The prices of items at the register is managed centrally. They ensure resources exist to increase prices at the register and not on the shelves, and that's misleading and fraudulent.
This isn't a pricing error. They should change their practices to require prices be updated on the shelves, and for that to be verified, prior to the prices at the register applying (and this should be required by law).
It's funny that it's criminal when someone shoplifts from a dollar store, but knowingly showing one price and charging a higher price isn't a crime. We need to start treating corporate theft as crimes, rather than as a cost of business.
This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter.
You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.
> everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process
Nobody agrees on that. TFA follows "a state government inspector" whose effectiveness is hampered solely by a "North Carolina law" which "caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection." That law [1] doesn't exist outside North Carolina.
This is the first time I'm reading about this. We have a dollar store in my town. I'm curious to replicate this experiment myself and send the results into the local newspaper if the discrepancy is real.
[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1
> this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process.
Yeah it does. This is specifically the sort of thing that the FTC is in charge of addressing.
That is ultimately controlled by who the president is. There is some funding problems with these enforcement agencies that forces them to pick and chose their battles. However, you'd be naive to think that there isn't a significant difference from how Lina Khan ran things and how Andrew Ferguson runs things.
Keep in mind, this is also a state thing. I live on the NC/SC/GA border so I view news for all three daily.
I routinely see this type of crime heavily policed and reported on in NC. Whereas my entire life is in coastal SC and never once in my life saw this repeated on or enforced.
In Massachusetts it's policed and enforced but the maximum fine per inspection is $5000 so it doesn't actually do anything (and it only applies to food anyway and stores are also allowed to exempt a fairly large number of items). https://www.mass.gov/info-details/accurate-scanning-and-pric...
It was investigated. They got fined $5k. 4 times.
Is there another law that can get them for repeat abuse.
Their attorney general could also sue them, as was done in several states mentioned- resulting in much larger settlements. Only the fines by the dept of weights and measures are limited.
>> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65.
The crazy thing is that even if it did ring up at the correct price it isn't a good deal. It's around $4.80-4.90 at Walmart and Target and others.
Paying 10 to 20 cents more for an item can still be a better deal than traveling further away to a larger store. The mis-pricing is completely unacceptable, though.
But because these stores exist, they lead to grocery stores no longer existing, because they eat the majority of the profit from grocery stores. This forces people to shop at the dollar stores because it's the only thing nearby. The dollar store model increases prices, reduces consumer choice, and makes us less healthy.
I haven't seen that happen, maybe it does in some places.
In my hometown, we had a grocery, but it closed in the earl 90s. They didn't get another on until the lat 00s. It was open a few years, had bare shelves most of the time and convenience store level prices when they did have something. In the late 10s, a Dollar General opened... so far, it has remained open, has much better prices than the previous attempts, and is generally much better stocked. The town hasn't grown in that time. But Dollar General is existing where no one had managed to survive before.
We'll see how it goes long term.
Dollar stores are one of the primary drivers of food deserts. Info on this is a quick google search away, as there's a ton of research around this: https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/how-dollar-stores-contribut...
Do they make higher margins?
On particular items, yes. As a whole, no. They have a lot of loss leaders, then rely on being generally overpriced to make that up. Grocery stores also rely on this, but at a larger scale, and when their higher margins dry up, they go out of business.
Dollar stores target grocery stores margin products, to drive them out of business.
It's worse than that. In many cases the dollar stores now get skus of items made for them that are "cheaper" than a sku in Walmart but for a more expensive unit price than Walmart as they shrink the product.
I am a POS system developer. Such errors can occur in the systems I develop, but they are unintentional—often caused by price data synchronization issues. I am actively working to resolve them.
> Left unsaid is that both Dollar General and Family Dollar would become unprofitable if they stop tricking customers. (Both companies typically earn only 3-4% on sales.)
They could of course show the actual prices instead of tricking customers?
If the margins are so low nobody else will be significantly cheaper anyway.
If a business model only works as long as customers don't notice the real price, then the model itself is fundamentally broken
It is important to understand that Dollar General and Family Dollar serve thousands of flyover communities where there are no Walmart stores or other viable market access. Dollar General has stated that it can generate profits in communities with fewer than 1,000 homes. Walmart generally requires a much larger population base for its stores.
Dollar General is the largest retailer in the US by number of locations, with over 20,000 stores across 48 states. Family Dollar operates over 8,200 stores. Walmart's U.S. store count is significantly smaller (around 4,700 U.S. Walmart stores and 600 Sam's Clubs as of 2024).
Dollar stores are frequently found at the heart of "food deserts," which are often rural communities located more than 10 miles from a grocery store selling fresh produce—a gap often created when a community is too small to maintain a supermarket or attract a retailer like Walmart.
I am not an attorney, but given that Dollar General and Family Dollar are highly likely to serve a much larger percentage of SNAP-eligible customers, isn't there a far more serious FEDERAL crime being perpetrated here of retailer abuse and fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamp fraud? That is, if the SNAP customers have no other means of purchasing food (living in a food desert), and the retailer is intentionally charging more for food items, isn't the retailer committing fraud against the US government? Federal criminal prosecution of SNAP violations could result in fines up to $250,00 and imprisonment up to 20 years. More significant consequences than otherwise being reported here.
So you are saying that Dollar Generals tend to open in areas where there isn't already a store that sells anything like food or otherwise? So would people in that "food desert" be better off without Dollar General opening a store? Because the only way I see that is feasible is if you only compare the reality of this situation to the fantasy ideal that isn't reality at all.
This is the tension that makes the whole situation so hard to fix
Would you be willing to elaborate?
Given how important these stores are to many communities, any attempts at fixing the situation have to be very carefully considered so as to not negatively impact those communities too much. At least in cities and places with other options, if those stores shut down, it isn't nearly as significant as small towns that rely on dollar stores.
23% of items are rung up at a higher amount at the register than what it says on the shelf, yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem.
In other words, regulatory capture at its finest, over the backs of the poorest in the country.
It’s not regulatory capture unless the regulatory body itself is controlled by shady grocers. This is just garden variety insufficient regulation. Although if they inspected every day it would probably still be profitable for the state.
The rich own congress. At this point, it's all regulatory capture.
While I agree, for the most part this comes under state regulations. Especially red states are always trying to cut taxes and the government at the cost of not having enough inspectors.
> yet North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection
So, have every agent in the state inspect them. Fine 5k. Immediately inspect again, different goods. Fine another 5k. Keep doing it opening hours.
Treat them like an inspection money piñata until they fix their ways. State gets a big pile of money to do better, and massive fines at 5k a pop for a few weeks punish the company and their bottom line.
Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?
A long time ago I used to help manage a couple retail stores. A $5k random expense would have put that location into the red for the month. Perhaps not the volume of a dollar store chain, but certainly not small either.
I have a feeling that if the $5k fines were basically guaranteed to happen with some regularity you’d see this cleaned up pretty quickly with local management replaced ASAP if not.
Enforcement doesn’t have to be over the top abusive with the goal to put a location out of business overnight. Especially in already underserved communities. Like everything to do with humans there simply needs to be consistent, reliable, and timely consequences to form a reliable and immediate feedback loop for behavior.
If a store makes it an actual policy to eat these fines then the fine amount needs adjusting. From everything in this article though the problem is simply it’s worth the gamble they don’t happen at all.
> Why are we taking this whole “the $5k fine is nothing” thing at face value?
Because the current country's idea of fines against egregious business practices mainly amounts to a 5% fine of the profit they defrauded those against.
It turns a punatative action into a "cost of doing business". Look at right now with Dollar General - 25% of their goods are priced higher at register, defrauding people. And what can be done? Leave. Because many states are completely ineffectual in strongly attacking this.
And although North Carolina caps inspection fines to $5k, how many times were they even inspected? And were any fines even submitted?
My guess is no.
I mean, more like someone elected and really high up in the state government calls the inspection office and tells them to stop, or everyone at the inspection office will get fired, since said elected person cares far more about getting reelected then the people that they should be representing.
Depending on how much independence the inspectors have they could probably turn a heck of a profit per inspector (thus being able to argue their continued existence to the legislature).
Could an inspector manage two per day? If you figure the full cost of each inspector is $150,000/year but dedicated ones could do 8 inspections at $5k each per week, there's well over $1 million/year per inspector (assuming not all inspections would be the full fine, there's travel costs per inspector, inspectors would have to spend some office/court time, etc. that would bring it down from the potential maximum of ~$1,800,000 each factoring in vacation and holidays).
Even Republicans could get behind it! "We're reducing the direct budget of the department, but authorizing it to hire additional inspectors in order to bring in additional revenue that can be utilized to bring the budget to or above its current levels." It's a cost reduction measure!
There's precedent for this; the Federal False Claims Act lets you sue on behalf of the government if you spot someone defrauding a federal program (in this case, perhaps if they take SNAP?). If your suit is succesful you get 15%-30% of the recovery for your troubles. There are "private attorney general" rules on the books at a state level too. I think it's kind of elegant, we can all see that inspections are understaffed, but non-compliance is often not that hard to spot and document. I'd propost that employees should have some whistleblower protection (and relief from NDAs and such) for building dossiers with supporting documentation of criminal fraud.
These provision are called "qui tam" from "qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur", or “who sues in this matter both for the king and for himself.”
I think they suit well with the US's history of bounty hunting, much like class action suits.
>Even Republicans could get behind it!
No, they have no actual interest in saving the government money, especially if it comes at the cost of enforcing regulations on corporations.
What this calls for is an Amazon-style optimization of inspections. Given X inspectors and Y locations, what is the most optimal routing to optimize for coverage and penalty collection?
Better optimization would be to make everybody an inspector. You catch a store doing it on video and report it to the agency, you get 50% of the fine.
In Australian supermarkets when the price of the item is wrong you get the item for free. (At least it was like that in 2011). Cashiers would run into the store to go fix the price tag.
Amazon-style optimization? You mean they send three different inspectors to the same store on the same day, each scanning one third of the necessary items for the audit?
Offtopic, but I made the mistake once of buying groceries from Amazon and they instead sold me a package of cheddar cheese that was completely blue from mold. Some "quality" inspections they got going don't bode well for public-private "partnerships" that outsource essential government functions to a corrupt third-party that's likely to be owned by a craptastic private equity hedge fund.
The error rate is nonzero, but in my experience Amazon will make it right with little friction. A short chat is almost always enough, no labyrinthine phone trees or escalations.
Last time I had to contact Amazon the chat option was no longer anywhere to be found. I gave up and actually called. They were nice enough on the phone but it was a good reminder of how much Amazon’s customer service has degraded.
Yes, but all problems with tainted food are not as visually obvious as mold. After some bad surprises, I've decided to never eat anything I ordered from Amazon.
Say what you will about the EU, but they figured out how to scale corporate fines correctly: max 10% of owning entities annual income.
Why are fines capped?
Maybe it's like unlimited PTO, without a cap nobody actually uses it.
I think because it's 10% income before cost deduction
I don't know NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice there where prices marked are a customer relations issue rather than a legally-binding offer?
To attain change, enough people have to:
1. Correctly identify the source of their misery, because it ain't [insert scapegoats].
2. Find others who agree with them.
3. Make a plan for effective countering of 1.
4. Use intestinal fortitude and endure temporary setbacks to achieve 3. to overcome 1.
5. Prevent 1. from ever happening again structurally, culturally, and through vigilant participation.
The 0th problem is the political operating system is captured by criminals and power has centralized grotesquely in ways that defeat the fundamental function of separation of powers. All elected officials corrupted by lobbyist bribes need to face accountability and have a code of ethics and integrity, because continuing down this path is the road to ruin.
I don't think the laws of the specific jurisdiction matter. In every US jurisdiction, the prices aren't completely legally binding (what if the previous customer changed the price tag?). In ~every US jurisdiction, if you systematically show one price but charge customers another, that's an offence.
So intent matters. What would decide an individual case is not the exact characterisation of the laws on the books, but how sympathetic a regulator or a judge is to the supermarket's claim that these things just happen sometimes.
If another customer changed the price tag, that would be in the same category as if a person unaffiliated with the store said "I'll give you a deal on this item for $10", then pocketed the money while you walked out with the (still not yours) item. This doesn't really have any bearing on whether the owner of a store putting up a sign with a specific price for a specific item that a customer can directly take possession of constitutes a binding offer.
Sure, but it's in the same category as the owner putting up a sign by mistake, or omitting to update a sign by mistake. Or more realistically, an employee of the owner putting up a sign even though the owner had instructed him to put up a different sign.
> or omitting to update a sign by mistake
No, in this case the shop is legitimately offering an item for sale, and then forgetting to change the price they are offering it at. It's quite disingenuous for a shop to put up signs, and then act like those numbers aren't legally binding, while the real prices are hidden away in a database somewhere. If they want to have their database be the authoritative copy pricing information, then they can just not put up price signs to begin with.
> If they want to have their database be the authoritative copy pricing information, then they can just not put up price signs to begin with.
This one really does vary by jurisdiction, but no, grocery stores generally must display prices by law.
Sure, but the point of those laws is to diminish the ability for merchants to obscure prices, as a deliberate public policy goal.
Such places are likely to have more proactive regulations against price discrepancies well, rather than common law "freedom".
Still I can imagine a few ways for a store to post prices without being in the territory of forming binding offers - keep stock only accessible to employees, post obnoxious signs everywhere stating that the prices are for informational purposes and that no offer is implied, require membership for entry with appropriate terms, etc.
Or rather than continuing to run the complexity treadmill trying to escape regulation, stores can just accept that they're bound by laws that were settled quite some time ago, and that their business includes making offers to sell items.
> NC law. Does it have an "invitation to treat" practice [...] rather than a legally-binding offer?
Are there any common-law jurisdictions in the world where having products on sale in a supermarket is not generally considered invitation to treat but as an offer to sell?
What is an invitation to treat, and how does a store with items on the shelf not constitute an offer to sell?
The invitation to treat is the store inviting potential customers to treat (engage in commerce) with the store by submitting an offer to buy the displayed items at the listed price, which they usually do by bringing the items to the register or (for more specialized purchases) telling a store employee that they want to buy the item. When the buyer makes the offer, the cashier accepts the offer on behalf of the store by ringing up the purchase, and the buyer performs their end of the contract by paying the price, thereby contractually gaining ownership of their purchase.
One reason it works this way is that treating displayed items as an offer to sell would leave it unclear to whom the offer to sell would be made. Clearly each item on display can only be sold to one of the many shoppers who sees it, so they can't all be offered the sale. There are several other reasons too, like different customers being offered different terms of sale based on loyalty program membership, promotions, student or senior discounts, etc.
Here is the Wikipedia summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
As the article says, the term in various US jurisdictions may be slightly different, like invitation to bargain, but the basic concept is the same. (I'm ignoring Louisiana entirely, which has a completely different legal tradition not derived from English common law.)
Thank you. The whole process is absurdly over-defined, but I understand why. Bad actors necessitate such wasted energy.
It comes from a UK case, Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain vs Boots Cash Chemist (southern division) from memory.
If the price on the shelf were an offer to sell, then you would be contractually obliged to buy everything you picked up. The offer comes instead from when you pass it to the cashier, which is why I'm saying for the third time on this thread, if you don't like that price walk out and leave the goods at the checkout...see if they find it more fun to put all your goods back, or put the correct prices on the shelf! If a group of people did this at every till the store would be effectively closed.
Seems like it actually creates an incentive to go big or go home. If you're already going to be busted and hit with the maximum fine, might as well have even larger mispricings, so you come out ahead after the fine is taken into account.
> little incentive to fix the problem.
It is all these Karen memes that ruined complaining about being screwed over by corparate interests.
[flagged]
It really is... God I'm glad I don't have to live there.
Regulatory capture is when a large company encourages stronger regulations that small competitors cannot afford to satisfy. Here the issue is regulation that is too weak, not too strong.
No, that’s just one form of regulatory capture. If this legislation is a result of lobbying from retailers opposing imposing meaningful fines, particularly if the state of things before its adoption was that penalties from failed inspections were often higher, then this is regulatory capture.
> But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem
This is a huge problem with all manner of laws in the US. We are not willing to insist that fees be limited only by their ability to prevent the prohibited behavior. Fines should continually escalate, if necessary until the offender is bankrupted, at which point their assets are taken. If Dollar Tree keeps doing this, the fines should eventually reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, even the billions. Such penalties should also apply to company executives and board members who are responsible for the company's overall conduct.
It looks like North Carolina’s previous Weights & Measures law was entirely criminal. So in 1991 they added civil powers, but curtailed the fines.
The solution here appears to be less in raising the civil fine and more in criminally investigating, to start with, the store manager [1].
[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1
The article metions Family Dollar and Dollar General. Dollar Tree is a different company.
Oops, true, that was a thinko on my part.
I'm not convinced that anything short of prison for executives and board members would be enough.
In Australia, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:
- Businesses must communicate clear and accurate prices prior to consumers booking, ordering or purchasing. They must not mislead consumers about their prices.
- There are specific laws about how businesses must display their prices.
- Businesses must display a total price that includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.
- If a business charges a surcharge for card payments, weekends or public holidays, it must follow the rules about displaying the surcharge.
- If more than one price is displayed for an item, the business must charge the lowest price, or stop selling the item until the price is corrected.
In practice, if the checkout price is more than listed price, many retailers give the item for free. It doesn’t stop dodgy constantly fluctuating ‘on sale’ pricing…
https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/price-displays
Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.
Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?
Regulators take tip offs and if one gets through, the enforcement action is usually pretty fast and strong.
They also like doing this. The ACCC makes a huge deal out of parading their latest conquest in the media.
Has its faults, the ACCCs dealings with telcos are especially terrible.
I still have friends at an Applecare provider based in oz, and they had a big one where as a settlement with the ACCC over trying to have it both ways with consumer law, they agreed to provide repairs or replacements for like a decade of wrongfully denied hardware issues. Hushed it right up. It was in lieu of a public apology from memory. But my friends spent weeks calling back old customers, chasing new contact details etc, to try and get them all free replacements.
I guess it might be a cultural thing? The shelf price is the binding price here in practice. If you get to the register at the supermarket and the price is higher, you can just let them know and they will send someone to check the price and match it.
Yes, seems to be partly regulation and enforcement partly cultural in a voluntary code of conduct that tends towards benefit to the consumer. For example,
[All the major grocery retailers] are signatories to the voluntary code of practice for computerised checkout systems in supermarkets. Generally, this means that if an item is scanned at the checkout at a higher price than it says on the shelf or as advertised, a customer is entitled to receive the first item free and all multiples of the same item at the lower price.
https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...
This practice not just matches price (dang, you caught us out this time), but incentivises minimising errors (oops, our bad, have it for free).
Yes, probably difficult to compare regulation and inspection.
As for enforcement, ACCC recently took Microsoft to Federal Court for hiding Copilot pricing shenanigans, as discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721682
When I worked grocery retail when I was a teen 20ish years ago, any time a customer disputed the price of something during checkout, we’d have someone check the shelf and find the display tag. If the price was lower as the customer suggested, we’d always give them the item at the price listed on the display tag. An employee usually just missed that tag during price change day.
It’s so foreign to me that any retail place would defer to “the computer” if display price and database price were out of sync.
Even young-me understood the idea of “oh yeah, our bad, have it at the lower price” and the potential for legal action if we did otherwise.
These stores often only have 1-2 employees working at a given time.
video if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Yeah, that "computer error" explanation is bullshit, probably rooted in a combination of CYA and narcissism.
When I worked in retail, we only had one database of pricing. The shelf tag and sign printers, the registers, the whatevers -- they all used that same database. If a shelf tag was printed at the same instant that an item was rung up, then they'd have had the same exact price.
There's mechanism for the prices to deviate.
(And yeah, pricing errors still happen at least because people are people. We make mistakes. We forget shit. We can even convince ourselves that we did a thing even if we didn't. We err. Even if we're absolutely honest with ourselves and others, we can run out of fucks to give. It's all part of our condition.
But of course: When a price was posted wrong then we fixed it once it was brought to our attention. The customer got the price that was posted, and the posting was changed.
For my own purposes, I had a habit of pulling the incorrect price tags and taking them with me back to the register; I'd just give them to whatever manager when they would show up with the key that was required for precise price adjustments and get back to doing whatever it is that my primary job was at the moment...which, if I were handling a register, meant something other than printing shelf tags.)
You need to think like an owner/operator to understand why you would defer to the system.
It’s to prevent employees from stealing. To “defer to the tag” requires a manual price override of some sort, which becomes an abuse vector.
While most comments will be negative toward Dollar General, in many areas Dollar General or Family Dollar or Dollar Tree are the only places you can get access and distribution to a wide range of products and brands in areas which are otherwise underserved.
You can dislike it, but they've evolved and expanded in part because they are very good at serving these areas profitably, where other businesses aren't.
People wanting bank branches and grocery stores and brunch spots here clearly have never lived or worked in many of these areas. The reality of theft, low spend, and employees - though not universal - is hard to fathom if you're not trying to 'run' the business. Good will does not pay your suppliers or rent.
I have overall had good experiences with Dollar General, but mis-pricing items like this is completely unacceptable. This article is very damaging to their brand to me. Even though I haven't experienced it myself.
Keep in mind this happens in all industries to varying degrees and causes.
I once worked as a cashier at “The Fresh Market” chain, a higher end, higher income store. We had this issue all day every day. I couldn’t go a shift without having to call over the manager for two or three price corrections. The root-cause was our incompetent stoner stock-boy would leave up discounted sale signs up for days and even weeks after the time had passed. Despite his bad work ethic he worked there for years because help was just that hard to come by. Nothing ultimately malicious by corporate but the end result looks suspicious as can be.
I understand that- the key is "varying degrees". This article documents several cases across multiple states that go well beyond reasonable. I've learned to be careful to look at the dates on sale tags.
Another thing many grocery chains do is list a price that is only for folks who sign up for the stores tracking program, rather than the price that folk who don't want to jump through whoops and sing the song and dance pay. (They put that price in the fine print).
Did you ever consider that they might have caused this situation?
It would help people to consider your point if you made even a modest attempt to explain and justify what you mean.
Dollar General and their ilk are behemoths compared to the shops that might have served these areas before they rolled in. It's possible they're the only game in town because they engaged in dumping or other dirty/illegal tactics to drive out established businesses.
I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.
Or perhaps more likely like a large corporation simply has economies of scale that smaller retailers cannot compete with.
My point is not to explain how they caused it, its to point out that the commenter didn’t even mention the existence of that possibility
It's possible, just unlikely.
The reality is a small business owner does not have the time or wherewithal to negotiate large contracts across hundreds or thousands of brands. They may nail SKU's and quantities better than a Wal-Mart or Dollar General, but at the price of higher costs and lower selection.
You don't really see large scale backlash in communities against these stores for this reason - buying branded at a reasonable price point is foundational for a good quality of life in modern society.
Most people vote with their feet, and are happy with the tradeoff.
Even if they accurately charged shelf prices, these places are still a ripoff targeting the vulnerable. The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.
While that can be bad, sometimes you come out ahead after accounting for spoilage, time, and travel.
Sometimes I pay higher unit prices at a dollar store intentionally because they offer smaller package sizes not offered elsewhere and I only need the smaller amount. I could get a much better unit price at another store but would waste the rest of the product.
Speaking of travel, that's why I go for them.
If I'm going for a multi-day stay somewhere and I don't want to deal with annoying mini bottles of hotel soap, I'll just pop into a Dollar Whatsit for a small bottle of something suitable at my destination.
I lived for an entire year out of just Dollar General and Dollar Tree. In some rough areas they are the only stores where you can buy groceries, so they have very clear monopolies. There are good value products, and like everything these days you have to use their apps to get the best offers. Also, the Dollar General app lets you check the price of everything before you take it to the counter. They regularly have items marked up at 1 cent.
The "dollar stores" vary.
I've been able to find good deals on some things at Dollar Tree. Usually the good deals were a smaller quantity of a normal-quality brand-name item. I mostly avoid the substandard quality items. But even sometimes substandard is OK if, say, you want to make your political demonstration sign on white foamcore (much cheaper than the art supply store, and you don't care if it's smaller, thinner, or outgassing) rather than on an Amazon shipping box.
There was a Family Dollar across from a large public housing project here, where I also went looking for deals, but the shelf prices looked like a convenience store. I didn't find out whether they were fraudulently charging even more at the register like this article describes. (I hope it closed because the residents knew there was an affordable Market Basket a 20-30 minute walk away, over the city line and train tracks, and they were able to get there and find the time for it.)
>>> rather than on an Amazon shipping box.
My wife attended a political protest, and said she noticed signs made from my employer's shipping boxes.
That's great, and a mix of all kinds of signs is to great effect. (People from all sorts of demographics using whatever means they can to be heard.)
Sometimes the sign-makers are artistically inclined, and may have access to better materials.
The most memorable example was at the political demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations) leading up to the Massachusetts constitutional convention that legalized gay marriage. For the State House one I photographed (learning photojournalism on the side), the anti-gay-marriage people were mostly bused in, including a pair of angry-looking old nuns in black full habit, and handed out the same ugly stock sign. (There's an obvious joke that they couldn't find a graphic designer who was sympathetic to the anti-gay cause.) Separated from them, across a street was a huge counter-protest, with an ocean of all sorts of creative, colorful, and positive handmaid signs, held by generally good-natured and thoughtful looking people.
Saying it only targets the vulnerable because of high unit prices is like saying the local gas station is a rip off that only targets the vulnerable because prices are higher.
I lived in a city that’s in North Metro Atlanta (Johns Creek) where the median household income was $160K. There was a Dollar General right by a Publix. People still went in the Dollar General for little things where the small packages that you could buy was feature and not a bug.
We still stop by the dollar store for snacks sometimes because it is convenient just to get things to pack for a flight. It’s especially popular for tourists in Orlando where I live
There is one near Naples in Florida I go to often just for the insane drink discounts compared to the Publix or Wawa or the Walmart Neighborhood Market thing across the street.
Have you ever been to a dollar store? Its much cheaper for the same items than a regular grocery store. Also not everyone needs a Costco sized tub of mayo. You test it yourself go by a standard sized candy bar at safeway/alberstons and then at a dollar store. Bottle of coke. Birthday card. Better yet compare the cost spices. Try to buy bay leaves at regular grocery store for under $5.
Candy bars and soda sure whatever. Look at essentials. The dollar store near me charges $1.99 for 8oz of Tide, the Albertsons a single block further charges $9.99 for 84oz, the dollar store is over double the cost. It's the same story with soap, cleaning products, etc. A tiny container for cheap feels like a deal if you can't do the math, but it's not. Feel free to "test it yourself."
I'm lucky in that I have a real grocery store nearby to compare to. If you live in a food desert where these big chains have driven out all competition you wouldn't have a choice.
It's not only the math but access to cash. Families living paycheck-to-paycheck struggle to make long-term investments. Paying 5x for larger quantities may pay off in the long-term, but if you're struggling to make ends meet and stretch dollars today, it might be overwhelming.
>Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness
in action.
And what's the problem with that? You get a discount for buying larger amounts of basically everything.
Dollar stores are crowding out grocery stores in areas that only have the clientele to support one grocery store. They sell only higher margin, long shelf-life shit food, whereas real grocery stores have to carry produce which cuts into margins considerably cause it goes bad. So it's easier for them to stay open. And they create food deserts there. They are a fucking scourge for small towns.
Sounds like the grocery stores were not serving their customer base well if they couldn’t compete with “overpriced” dollar stores.
Carrying cost of produce does not add up. If produce is going bad at that spoilage rate the store management fucked up and didn’t order the correct amount of product for the location. You can’t wish your way into a product mix.
Nothing was stopping grocery stores from identifying this need. Pretending your customer base is more affluent than it is sounds like a quick way to go out of business to me.
Then feel free to explain the studies and articles online describing how dollar stores are fucking rural grocery stores.
Explain why rural customers prefer the dollar store to the grocery store? Are they just stupid and don't know what's best for themselves?
Perhaps the rural grocers are not carrying the appropriate product mix for their current (new?) customer base, and are overvaluing customer service?
I don't like it - but I also spend time in rural communities and see why these places beat the local grocers. They offer better value for the dollar. Often they are indeed cheaper on a unit cost basis, much less overall per transaction.
It's sort of like folks screeching about "food deserts" in urban communities I've lived in, thus enacting laws forcing fresh produce be carried by the local convenience stores. That produce simply rotted on the shelves since - surprise! - the local business owners knew their customer base better than a bunch of do-gooder ivory tower academics did.
You can make some strong cases for Walmart putting Main Street rural America out of business using predatory pricing schemes and the like. It's a lot more difficult for dollar stores.
They do not offer better "value on the dollar" they offer units that individually cost less but over a year of buying what you need to survive you pay more. That's how items are generally priced; smaller packages, higher unit price (as in, price per ounce).
You shouldn't say "screeching" if you want to be taken seriously, it makes you sound shallow and dismissive, incapable of understanding how your narrow outlook is not applicable in some situations.
Please, take even the most basic efforts to understand what people are talking about here instead of forcing me to shove information down your throat like you haven't learned how to use an internet search yet. You don't need my help, and nothing I can say will be more convincing than your own personal research.
> They do not offer better "value on the dollar" they offer units that individually cost less but over a year of buying what you need to survive you pay more. That's how items are generally priced; smaller packages, higher unit price (as in, price per ounce).
Does the consumer not have all of the information available to them to make the comparison of the per unit cost between a dollar general and a local grocery?
Is information availability the only constraint keeping people from making optimal choices?
Objectively yes that's the case. However, people are irrational and their irrationality is being exploited.
I don't see anything that says they are "fucking" them. I see plenty that they are out competing them. People get to choose to go to whatever grocery store they like.
Perhaps you you are motivated to believe that it's just "markets" at play. Monopolies and extortionate power don't exist, anyone who wins deserves to win, etc. Here is the top search result when I search for "dollar stores killing grocery stores" in Kagi.
> When dollar store chains open, it almost always cuts into the sales of local businesses. At first glance, it might seem like this is simply the nature of competition. But dollar stores use their hefty market muscle to make it virtually impossible for other businesses to successfully compete. With plenty of cash from shareholders and institutional investors, chain dollar stores have the resources to lose money indefinitely in a community until their competitors have folded.
> For many businesses, losing even a small percentage of sales can put the business at risk of failure. There are many types of businesses whose products overlap with chain dollar stores and that are therefore vulnerable, including hardware, small appliances, toys, reading materials, greeting cards, and health and beauty supplies. With dollar stores averaging around 10,000 square feet in size and sales of around $260/square foot, a typical Dollar General captures over $2 million in sales every year — and those sales are likely coming out of the cash registers of businesses already there.1
> This is an enormous problem for grocery stores in particular, which have razor-thin profit margins. Cutting into a grocery store’s sales even a small bit can endanger its survival. Food is what customers buy most often in dollar stores,2 making dollar stores a clear threat to grocery store survival or creation. And grocery stores’ profit margins are higher on items other than fresh produce — things like processed, prepackaged food and snacks — which is the bulk of the food that dollar stores sell. Peeling off just enough sales of packaged food can send a grocery store into the red.
> There are many examples of grocery stores that closed when a dollar store opened nearby...
https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/17-problems/
How about you cite something.
https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/dollar-stores-are-killing...
This does not prove, at all, what you are claiming.
K
I just replied to another comment. I lived in the most exclusive part of Atlanta for awhile where there was a Dollar Store right next to the Publix right next door to our $2500/month apartment.
https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Dollar+Stores&find_loc...
Median home price - $700K
There are a lot of times you want smaller packages.
Source that they are replacing grocery stores? Dollar stores are closing and not expanding . 99 cents stores went bankrupt, rest have been closing hundreds of stores.
Also dollar stores carry produce just grocery at least largest ones do like dollar general. They are designed to compete against grocery stores and wallmart’s neighborhood markets.
There have been a few articles about this over the past couple of years, usually in reference to one study or another. Here's one that references a USDA study:
https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/dollar-stores-are-killing...
There's variations in dollar stores, and in packaging, and deals, and everything else.
Let's play with Tide, and with Kroger and Dollar General just because those are the two retailers that are near to me. We'll do biggest and smallest, and start with the smallest.
---
The smallest bottle of original Tide that the Dollar General near me has is 34 ounces for $6.00: $0.1765 per ounce.
The Kroger near me has a similar, but lesser, bottle as their smallest offering: 32 ounce bottles for $5.99: $0.1872 per ounce.
Dollar General wins on smallest.
---
The biggest bottle of Tide at Dollar General is 115 ounces; regularly, $16.95 ($0.147 per ounce). On sale for $15.95 ($0.139 per ounce). With a $4-off digital coupon, $11.95 ($0.104 per ounce).
At Kroger: 132 ounces for $19.99 ($0.151 per ounce). (With a $5-off-of-$25 digital coupon if I feel like giving Proctor & Gamble even more of my money in one transaction.)
Dollar General also wins at biggest. They win at regular price, and today they also win at sale price.
shrug
---
Convenience also has a cost. For instance: I ran out of cat food on Christmas Day. Everything nearby was closed except for a Circle K, so I walked over there to see what they had. And they had cat food (of course they did). I bought the smallest container of Purina dry cat food I've ever seen for ~$9.
That was a lot of money for such a small amount of cat food, but I was happy to pay it. They had the right product in the right place at the right time. (And most importantly, the cat was happy.)
So these big chains have drive out all competition. I assume you are referring to the big chain dollar stores. So how did they drive out all competition? Did they do it by charging more for items or by charging less for items? I think I am failing to see any sort of logic in the argument here.
Did you know you can save even more buying B2B/wholesale?
Sometimes it is more about the upfront cost and/or resulting storage space needed, than pure price efficiency.
Spices might be the most universal ripoff anywhere in the US. You can get it so much cheaper either at ethnic stores, generic plastic bags at certain grocery stores in the ethnic aisles, or restaurant supply stores for spices that don’t have a short shelf life.
It’s so bizarre to me. At some point someone needs to do an in-depth expose on how this spice monopoly happened.
It doesn't sound all that monopolistic if there really are as many different places to buy it at cheaper prices as you say in your same comment...
Spices are pretty much universally horribly overpriced at grocery stores.
time value of money
we don’t complain that the per unit cost at target is higher than at costco
Because it's very rare that Target crowds out the only Costco that sells produce in a 20 mile radius leaving only boxed shit food for people to buy.
> The list price is low but the per-unit price is astronomical compared to grocery store prices.
The problem is, so is material cost and handling effort. Say, a 2 liter bottle of soda compared to 10x 200 mL. Same amount of soda, but more handling required for stocking, inventory management (aka, make sure there is no soda expiring on the shelf) and finally scanning it over the cash register, and more packaging material.
Larger units of anything will always be cheaper than small units.
People usually understand this, but realize driving 10 minutes to dollar tree for a few items is preferable to driving 30 minutes to cheaper shop
Aw man, that is such a rip off!
Grocery stores are a rip off too. The per unit price of items at them are astronomical compared to Sam's Club prices.
Sam's Club is a rip off too. The per unit price of items at them are astronomical compared to the wholesale price.
Yup. Dollar General is worse than a convenience store like 7-11, it's an expensive inconvenience store.
And we need more local co-op grocery stores like Berkeley Bowl, the Davis Co-op, and ATX Wheatsville.
I have yet to visit a co-op that had cheaper than grocery store prices. Every single one focused on quality over cost savings.
This was not always the case. 30 years ago the customer base for bulk co-op places were lower-middle class/poor folks who had a decent amount of financial acumen. You'd go there with your own containers and buy staples by the pound. Or special order that 50lb bag of oats or flour for 1/4th the per-lb price of the local grocery store.
They slowly morphed into bougie health nut/conspiracy hippie stores during my lifetime. Closest thing I've found to what I remember them being are food service stores which tend to require a business tax ID to buy from.
Davis Co-op c. 2000 was legit cheap and good. I lived across the street from it for some time.
I can do without the "health/wellness" aisle of mystery fluid bottles almost entirely. Whole Paycheck Foods and a lot of independent grocers also have this fad and it's depressing that borderline Miracle Mineral Solution nonsense is allowed through under-regulated "supplement" exceptions. More power to those who benefit from ever-so-slightly-helpful / placebo vitamins-supplements but it seems like mostly from snake oil of a century ago.
Anyhow, there are/were more decent grocers. Like Lundari's 30 years ago in the SF Bay Area. The status quo isn't the only available option.
LOL yeah OK, are we just making random statements now?
Yup. Outback Steakhouse is worse than a fast food store like McDonald's, it's an expensive not fast food store.
If you live in Seattle and you find items are rung up for the wrong price, I highly recommend reporting it to the city. I did this once and was shocked that they promptly sent someone out to check the store and issue a citation. The inspector who emailed me was very polite and professional as well. It's rare to have something like this taken seriously and to have the enforcement properly funded.
Unfortunately I don't remember which form I filled out but I believe it was this one
https://www.seattle.gov/your-rights-as-a-customer/file-a-com...
an interesting contrast that i think about a lot:
- in rural america, there are dollar stores everywhere that overcharge for small items. people treat them as a necessary evil and begrudgingly shop there.
- in nyc, there are corner bodegas everywhere that overcharge for small items. they are generally seen as beloved neighborhood institutions.
so... what's the difference? corporate owned vs family owned? length of time in community? presence of cute cat at the register?
This article is about something subtly different than overcharging: it's about consumers believing that they're paying one amount (the list/sticker price), and being charged a different amount (typically higher in the company's favor) at checkout.
In my experience, this doesn't really happen with bodegas: they might be overpriced in the "this is a bad deal for milk" sense, but they don't misrepresent their sticker prices to any degree that I've ever experienced.
(But also, I don't think bodegas do categorically overcharge in NYC. I think they're about the same as grocery stores, i.e. there's a large amount of internal variation in pricing because people generally don't want to make multiple bodega pit stops just to save $2.00 on eggs.)
Bodegas charge you a little bit more because a real human owner accepts the risk of serving a small community in exchange for being part of that community, and you pay that extra in order to make their existence possible.
Dollar Generals charge you a little bit more because a huge chain has driven out all the competition and you have no choice. The people who work there do not benefit from the extra you pay, and the owners are not members of the community.
There was no competition in many places dollar stores operate. They moved into those places specifically because they were underserved by larger retailers.
I agree, at least in my area.
Two neighboring dollar stores just went out of business in a town I commute through. The culprit? A new Harp's grocery store a block away.
The dollar store in my town is barely holding on - the competition? A Walmart across the street.
The only thing keeping it afloat is literally balloons I feel. Walmart doesn’t sell helium inflated ones.
Ehh I disagree. "No competition" yet I bet every home in the area still had groceries in the kitchen before the dollar general opened.
Sure. Because they were driving 25 minutes each way to the nearest Walmart to do their shopping, not 5 minutes down the street.
Once upon a time I lived near the Prague city centre, and if the intent of such a corner shop is to rip off tourists and one-time visitors, the locals don't mind - at least as long as cheaper alternatives off the most notorious areas exist and are usable for them (Lidl etc.)
Quite to the contrary, the locals are sometimes happy to have such overcharged options at hand, for example if they are throwing a party and find out that they are short on vodka+cigs, and it is 1 am and all the regular shops are closed.
Because in NYC I pass by tens of the bodegas on the way to work and I can shop at any one of them. I can also shop at Aldi’s, Trader Joe’s, Costco, what have you.
You said it well yourself - “begrudgingly”. With so many options and price points, I don’t have to begrudgingly shop at bodegas. I do it happily if it serves my goal of getting a single can of Coke. If I want to get a whole stack of them, I’d happily get them at Costco. Options are great when you have them.
Hey, Starbucks charges $3.50 for a cookie, I could buy 4 at the local bakery or two at the farmers market for that much (and get a better cookie).
>Hey, Starbucks charges $3.50 for a cookie
No, that's not what the article is about.
"Starbucks has a sign saying the cookie is $3.50. You are charged $5 at the counter".
That is the infraction here.
Minimum wage in NY is $15.50, in Kansas it's $7.25. The overcharging in rural areas is not adjusted downward for lower wages. But I wouldn't shop at a bodega and don't find it virtuous there either.
Probably „only store that’s in my vicinity“ in rural areas vs. „if that bodega sucks, I go to another“. So one is a necessity which overcharges, the other a convenience which overcharges.
In both cases they charge a little more because the next store charges a little more too.
Not really sure where your examples or experiences come from, but the majority of rural people that I know love most of their dollar stores.
> what's the difference?
Did you read the article? Charging what's actually on the price tag is the first thing that's the difference.
Do any of you actually shop at Family Dollar? I do. They're cheaper on a lot of stuff. A box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is $2 less than the same box at the grocery store in town. I bought a pair of shoes there for $4. They weren't stylish, but lasted longer than the last pair of Nikes I purchased.
Yeah, sometimes the sale price posted on the shelf is no longer applicable. Either the employees don't feel like they are paid enough to be vigilant or maybe they're too overworked to keep up. Whatever the case, you just learn to keep an eye on the checkout, or alternately ask for a price check on it before the cashier starts ringing merch. The second approach is more polite and the cashiers appreciate that.
The same thing commonly happens at the grocery store, and other stores I shop at too. It's not unique to Family Dollar or Dollar General. But I will note, at the Family Dollar, the cashiers will often say "This is on sale now, but it's not posted yet. That whole shelf is discount." And they will give me a better price than what I was expecting to pay. They have to manually adjust the price to give that discount to me a lot of times. Grocery cashiers just scan as quickly as they can and don't check.
So while all the yuppies who never step into dollar stores are acting hyperoffended about this story, I think the story is unfairly targeting the dollar stores. Apparently saving money gives some people here the "ick" but the employees there are only human. A lot of times, lower paid humans. Cut 'em some slack.
I shop at Family Dollar sometimes, and also Dollar General and (shock, horror) even Dollar Tree.
I shop at these places because I am very cheap, and these places are also often (not always, but often) very cheap and the selection is usually pretty good, for the size.
And before someone else blames math for my perception: I can math. I can also remember prices between the shelf and/or the website and the register, and between different stores. (I've been cheap for a very long time. One cannot succeed at being cheap without honing these kinds of skills.)
The shelves at these places aren't beautifully-faced. The lighting is shit -- lowest-bidder, lacking design coherence, and either too bright or too dim. The music, if it exists, is usually a Bluetooth speaker playing from an employee's phone or a single pair of thrift store speakers from a 1990s Aiwa mini system [sometimes, even fancy-style with one on each side of the building] with some local radio station or other playing. There's usually large delivery carts sitting around in the already-narrow aisles with fresh inventory that the 1 or 2 employees who might be present sometimes get time to stock a bit of.
And that's... that's all just fine.
I don't want to pay for beautifully-faced shelves, good lighting, and a professionally-installed overhead PA system that plays professionally-programmed musical selections in a professional manner. I don't want to pay for shelves that are magically stocked in the wee hours of the morning by a dedicated team of professional stockpeople.
Like, seriously: I'm not that proud. My goal is to save money; shopping for inexpensive canned beans and a gallon of milk from some factory farm does not have to be an enriching, transcendent experience.
So when I have need to buy stuff, and there's a Family Dollar across the street from the office and Dollar General is around the corner from my house? I cheerfully stop in and give them my money.
The employees are almost unilaterally very polite and helpful. They know the entire store's products very well, even if the price tags aren't always up-to-date. It's a good, quick, cheap place to shop for good cheap stuff.
(I see comments here that read like "I only shop at Whole Foods. I went to an Aldi once and turned right around and walked out" and all I can think of are callously demeaning phrases like "You blithering, sheltered, classist snob. It may be possible for a person to bring even less relevancy to this discussion, but I cannot presently imagine how that would be possible."
But I usually try to keep that kind of phrasing to myself.)
I experienced this first hand maybe a year ago when I randomly walked into a dollar general to get something, their prices often times are pretty close to the "regular" versions of the product, but packaged specifically for dollar stores.
I get why people shop at them in rural places because that's the only shop within 10-20 miles but in cities it makes no sense. Had prices been 20-30% cheaper but in a smaller size it would still be a ripoff but an understandable one, but often times I saw products that were priced just 3-5% below their standard counterparts while giving you maybe 30%-50% of the product.
Every store has some stuff that is overpriced compared to peers and some stuff that is underpriced. Dollar stores make their money more on drastic understaffing (leading to the issue in the article) and national scale than they do on being a consistently worse value. They have the cheapest freeze dried strawberries by weight you can get anywhere other than making them yourself.
Same. My city has a Walmart, Publix, Food Lion, Kroger, and Aldi. Yet they keep building dollar stores, I think there's now 5 within 10 miles of my house. They all seem to do decent traffic, which baffles me. The stores are a mess, items disheveled everywhere, and rare to see more than a single person working. Really depressing places, I cannot figure out their appeal.
People still think they’re getting. Deal. They’ll figure it out eventually. Same with goodwill selling clothes for at or above new prices, eventually the knowledge propagates.
The main thing keeping the local dollar stores alive is the death of Party City as far as I can tell.
> North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
Well, there’s your problem.
Lots and lots of articles written about 23% of 300 items -- at one store? Every store?
What's the actual extent of the problem?
There have been way too many articles and videos at this point to keep pointing at the same small data set.
I've personally never experienced an overcharge, and at 1 in 5, it should have happened by now.
Is this a one store thing, or a regional thing, or should I just put those thoughts on hold and rage blindly?
You didn't read far enough:
> Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
> Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.
> Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.
> The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.
This comment section is full of allegations that dollar stores are predatory, yet when I look up their operating margins they are super low (4% for Dollar General, for example).
Yeah, queue the HN fake outrage about big companies and their C-Suite who are billionaires on the backs of the little people. So predictable.
Fact is, Dollar General and similar stores provide a real value to people who live in rural areas. Yes, their prices may be higher for some goods, but that is the price you pay for the convenience they provide. People are free to drive another 20mins to a WalMart or another store to save $0.50 for the same can of corn or loaf of bred. And, people who are really on a budget actually scrutinize the register receipts to make sure they are paying the price listed on the shelf. They can immediately bring up the discrepancy to the staff.
[dead]
Just because your margins are low doesn't mean you still aren't screwing over poor people.
It’s a bit like payday loans; they are a bad financial deal, but the alternative is no credit at all because the people who get them are high-risk borrowers and the costs associated with making and servicing a loan aren’t radically different for $500 or $50k.
Being poor is tough. But the low margins are a pretty good indicator that the alternative to shady businesses is simply not having businesses at all.
There is a difference.
ROI on payday loans for lenders is typically very high and their main issue is usually regulation that limits the volume they can transact. ROI on dollar stores is very low because the margin is low, costs are high, and inventory turns is relatively low. For example, Dollar General's inventory turns are half Walmart, that means that to continue operating they need to charge higher prices (the margin).
Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years. If you take out industries with intellectual IP and the secular shift in margin due to taxation changes, ROI across industries is relatively stable...because margins don't matter. What is a good indicator of customers exploitation is if ROI is high. For dollar stores, shareholders are getting exploited, not customers (look at DG/DLTR share price, this is with a secular upturn in multiples, if you take out unit growth which is inherently limited the financial performance is non-existent).
> Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inventory across multiple years.
This is wrong because quarterly reporting normalizes for expenses in same period
The part you have quoted is a written explanation of the DuPont formula. It is nothing to do with reporting periods, it is just a calculation of the return from a business. A high-margin business is not, necessarily, a high-return business (and in the context of the discussion above, high returns is a sign of exploitation...dollar stores are low returns, the shareholders are being exploited not customers).
LOL it just seems that no business can do right here. So these low margin stores should just shutter and close up shop because they are somehow still "screwing poor people"? Would you commend them if their business just infinitely ran at a loss or gave people cash at the register instead of charging them anything for the items that they want?
Wait, why? I get the emotional resonance of this, but unless their marketing spend is egregious I just don’t know how you can argue their whole business model is predatory.
This happens at Walmart Canada all the time. The policy there is to slash 10$ off shelf price (or free for anything 10 or less).
Since COVID, Walmart has stopped having immediate fixes of the problem.
Since 2020, I have accumulated about $1200 in free merchandise using the above. Almost always food.
Publix in the southeast US will give you anything that rings up wrong for free. I shopped there for 20+ years and only remember getting a handful of things free.
I'm in Toronto and I've never had anything ring up incorrectly at Wal-Mart. I can't recall ever having anything ring up incorrectly anywhere else, either. There have maybe been a couple of times where a sale price didn't apply to all the SKUs I thought it did.
The disastrous Target Canada (iirc) was similar; obviously nobody cared at all.
As someone who typically only enters a Whole Foods or a Home Depot for her retail experiences, the one time I entered a Dollar General, I was struck by how depressing it felt. I would never go back into one. Yes, I know how out of touch this sounds.
I think that's deliberate: you walk into a dollar store and think "they aren't spending a dime on the shopping experience, so they must be passing that dime onto me."
Yes, yes of course. The leftover smell of homeless urine by the front door isn't real; it is only carefully calculated scents piped in by corporate dollar store yuppies to have you believe this is an authentic experience.
I have a very, very convenient Walmart including a pharmacy so I do go in from time to time especially for standardized purchases. But I don't really like it. And I poked my head into an adjacent Aldi once and retreated. Otherwise not really worth the headache.
I shop at Walmart and Costco. The customers at the Costco appear much better off, but they seem much more arrogant and inconsiderate. They leave carts in the middle of the aisle, talk on phones with their families blocking the way, and so forth. Same behavior in the parking lots. Maybe it's because Costco is always packed. The shoppers at the Walmart definitely look less well off. They are much more respectful and considerate of others. I like shopping at the Walmart more.
The shoppers at costco vary drastically by location. If you have more than one warehouse reasonably close by, it may be worth your while to try them all.
Both Family Dollar and Dollar General declined interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions from the Guardian. Instead, both sent the Guardian brief statements.
“At Family Dollar, we take customer trust seriously and are committed to ensuring pricing accuracy across our stores,” the company said. “We are currently reviewing the concerns raised and working to better understand any potential discrepancies. We continue to be focused on providing a consistent and transparent shopping experience.”
Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
They make it sound like isolated incidents. Someone should keep following up on statements like that until they are fixed, or refer them to a DA. No?
Furthermore, what about "false advertising" laws?
> “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
I don’t knnow about 'expected', but 'not plausible' is up to the company to get their shit together. My spouse works in retail - nobody has time on the shop floor to change label prices all day. Some prices change by a few cents, and then a week later, they change again. If annyone complains, they get the scan-at-the-register price, and then the particular area in question gets a very quick emergency team sent in to re-do all the physical tags.
Why not let people scan QR codes like restaurants do for menus?
> Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
Can you explain to me how USA is called civilized? How somebody can say things like that, and how a shop is even allowed to have an error margin
The article touches on this:
All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold.
This implies that an error rate of perhaps 2% would be legal. I haven't checked, but I guess Europe has something similar even though I'm quite certain that retailers have to sell things at the posted price if there's a mistake.
Part of the problem seems to be that the maximum fine (at least in the state in the article) is "too low", so retailers don't have an incentive to keep price tags correct since they profit from the error and even if they're fined it's still better (economically) for them to charge more than the price tag. I wonder how much lobbying has happened to keep fines low ...
The interesting question would be how many products came in lower, but sadly the article doesn't include that.
If 23% were higher and 23% were lower then you could make a reasonable argument that it's just incompetence from the store.
But if 23% are higher and none are lower, then that looks a lot more like malice - because the odds of you happening to have a 23% error rate than just happens to always work out in the retailer's favour are basically zero.
I worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience.
Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.
And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.
> Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing.
If corporate had to wait until every store signaled "all clear" on paper tags, most retail businesses would go bankrupt in record time. The margins are not fat enough to run things this slowly.
Dollar stores have on average a 2% profit margin, just like grocery stores. They are not the villains here.
Their returns (margins are irrelevant) are usually lower than grocery stores. Large retailers will turn over their inventory tens of times a year, dollar stores won't so the returns are typically lower.
For some reason, left-wing journalists turn into law of one price zealots when confronted with this issue. The reality is that these locations have low-volume and stores everywhere are relatively expensive to run now. For some reason, journalists get angry at the company rather than people who control how much it costs stores to operate. I mean local governments in the US had no problem accepting Dollar General's sales tax from their poor constituents shrug probably more than the corporation is making from the store.
I live in the UK and there is a store like this, Co-Op. The Guardian finds it easier to blame evil foreign corporations because the Co-Op has much higher prices but is a non-profit so the narrative of the evil corporation crumbles.
What does their margin have to do with anything? Or, what things do you think they should and shouldn’t be able to do given their low margins?
Not charging the best-advertised price is dishonest. It might also be in customers' best interest if the cost of keeping consistent price data on low-margin items costs more than whatever the inconsistency is. Or the answer might be that dollar stores sell too wide of a variety too cheaply on too low-margin product to play supermarket-style pricing games effectively.
You can find a poor me for almost any corporation to excuse their ripping people off.
This is like cheating in a golf match against a professional and then saying "I got the same score as my opponent, I am not the villain here".
Do you think large dollar stores are faking or cheating their profit margin numbers?
This is like me showing you my scorecard after cheating at golf, and saying "do you think the scorecard is fake?".
Real profit margin. Achieved through deceit. This is vilainy.
I mean, they are cheating customers on the item price, so it goes to show they'll do illegal stuff without care, so yea, why not.
how happy do you think the shareholders would be about that?
"We get more money and they keep coming back?, carry on"
I don't think it is, so maybe you can help me draw the parallels.
Both groups have the same profit margin (golf score). One group is achieving it by deceive customers (cheating at golf) while the other is achieving it without doing that (being good at golf).
Especially since it’s advantageous to adjust suppliers that you own to maintain tiny margins (who owns the land they rent, for example)
Subsidiary income would be included in a financial statement.
Not if the landlord is a side entity and not a subsidiary.
You were talking about subsidiaries, though.
The company owning both Dollar General and the sister real estate would report consolidated income.
If you're saying there's a secret arm's length relationship between a dollar store chain and a real estate holding, structured just to trick the public into thinking low cost retail is low margin, I'm afraid that is not true.
Dollar stores are the new neighborhood "outlet stores" compared to outlet stores of yesteryear (remote locations for not much/any savings). They're actually glorified convenience stores while also not being proper substitutes for grocery stores in food deserts. Most US grocery stores are also now rip-offs like convenience stores were, while big box stores are somewhat savings stores now... f'kin' turbo inflation.
I don't know about the feasibility of government grocery stores, but I'm pretty sure the entire food supply chain would benefit from massively changing to the employee-/customer-/supplier-owned co-op model and get megacorps and private equity out of the normalized deviancy of predatory money extraction for essential goods and services.
I believe Michigan has laws on the books that should be the model for this (the "Scanner law") - if you're overcharged at the register and the sale is completed, you have 30 days to get the price corrected plus ten times the amount of overcharge (between $1 and $5). Paying you the 'bonus' is optional, but if they don't do so you can file a suit for the greater of your actual damages or $250 (in small claims on your own or regular court which allows up to $300 in attorney fees).
An alternative would be to force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close until they've completed a full audit of all shelf prices in the store but in some areas that could cause significant local hardship.
> force stores with mischarge rates exceeding a specified level to close
They'd leverage it as if it was an allowance and stay just below that rate.
That is already ludicuously complex. Designed by Kafka so you give up.
If the goal is to fix the behavior instead of just documenting it, the penalties need to escalate with repeat violations. The first mismatch can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth inspection still shows the same pattern, the fine shouldn't be the same $5k: it should jump sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the profit from letting it continue.
Right now the incentive structure is backwards. As long as the downside is fixed and small, large retailers will keep treating it as business-as-usual. A tiered system tied to repeated violations would at least push them toward actually fixing the issue, instead of just shrugging it off every time they get caught.
Right on.
If the goal is to fix student grades instead of just documenting it, the points counted off need to escalate with repeated incorrect answers. The first incorrect answer can be treated as an honest mistake. But when the third or fourth quiz still shows the same incorrect answers, the grade shouldn't be the same C; it should decline sharply. At some point the cost of ignoring the problem has to exceed the points from letting it continue.
You just solved education!
”Dollar General argued that when customers create accounts – for example, by downloading the company’s mobile app – they agree to use arbitration to resolve disputes and forfeit the right to file class-action suits. The judge agreed.”
Let me guess, the mobile app provides discounts…?
I wish I could be surprised and I can see this happening in many places. This type of 'fraud' was predicted when we allowed the stores to stop marking items with the price.
Many places were I shop, hardly any products are lined up with the price attached to the shelves, plus the descriptions of some items are confusing due to the multiple names for the same thing.
Time to force stores to mark each item with the price once again.
Happened to me yesterday. Haagendaz ice cream. $4 on the shelf, $5 at the register.
If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft. Not even if it was a mistake on the part of some employee (and it's not the employee's fault either, by the way)
The store is under no legal obligation to sell it to you, just like you're not obligated to buy it for that price. Depending on the situation, that might be false advertising they could get in trouble for, and obviously you're not committing a crime if you don't know the real price, but if someone says "oops, that's a mistake", and you take it anyway and give less money, that is theft in most states.
True. They can keep you out of the store. Under some circumstances they can indeed keep you out of the store. However it's still the US and the reasons for keeping people out of stores are restricted, and we've all learned in high school why.
But, once inside, an offer is made through the pricetag and accepted the sale is final. Before payment, before ... The whole point of price tags is making an offer. So if you are inside the store, take the good, and accept the sale at the price on the tag, obviously a court will rule both sides are in agreement about the sale and price at that point (NOT at the cash register) and that's that.
Additionally, money legislation makes cash the universal cop-out. You can always choose to settle a debt through cash. And that debt is what's on the price tag, the offer that was accepted, nothing else. In other words, the cashier and the manager, hell the CEO comes down and refuses? Give them cash and walk out with the goods. Perfectly legal thing to do. The sale was already final, and this settles the debt. Done and done.
This is why messing with price tags in stores is such a serious offense.
This goes pretty far in law. You can actually go to the IRS, ask to pay with cash money, and they'll let you pay your tax bill cash. Cash is the universal cop-out.
https://www.irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-with-cash
>If it says $4 on the shelf and you pay $4 at the register and walk out with the goods, that's a 100% legal sale and not theft.
Source? What happens if somebody stuck a $1 sticker on a ps5? Does that mean you can walk out paying $1 for it, even if the cashier corrects you? What if it's not something absurd but a plausible good deal, like $50 off?
It literally is the employee's fault but they are not legally liable for it.
An employee is generally only liable if they purposefully sabotage their employer's business. So a mistake doesn't cut it.
And that's effectively an impossibly high bar in the typical mundane cases though.
Have the fines pay out to customers that report and suddenly the issue is gone.
“In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.””
Sorry—-what? Isn’t that one of the fundamental basic jobs to be done and expectations of a retailer? You put physical things on display for sale, you mark prices on them, and you sell them. When the prices change, you send one of your employees to the appropriate shelves and you change the tag.
When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
I used to work at Best Buy replacing pricing stickers before the store opened. We had a sheet of new stickers for changed prices every time and had to scan every sticker in the store to make sure they were all up to date.
It makes sense they’re all switching to e-ink tags though, probably saves a ton in labor and the occasional mistake.
That's because those stickers constitute an offer of sale for a given price. If a customer comes in, takes the item, throws down the cash to an employee and leaves, that's a 100% bone fide legal sale.
That's also why messing with price stickers is a crime.
> When on earth did we get into a world where that absolutely fundamental most basic task is now too burdensome to do with accuracy?
It always has been this way since barcoded stock keeping units because of the problems identified by CAP Theorem [0]. Since the price data of an object must exist in two locations, shelf and checkout, the data is partitioned. It is also relatively expensive to update the shelf price since it depends on physical changes made by an unreliable human. Even if all stores used electronic price tags there will a very small lag, or a period in which prices are unavailable (or a period of unavailability like an overnight closure).
It would be interesting to understand at what point of shelf/checkout accuracy would lead to what increases in overall prices [1]. That is to say that pricing information has a cost: a buyer must bring the item to checkout to find out the true cost in the case of authoritative checkout, or the clerk must walk to each shelf in the case of authoritative shelf.
Once upon a time, each item in the store was labeled with a price tag and the clerk typed that tag into a tabulation device in order to calculate tax and total. The advent of the bar code lead to shelf label pricing since the clerk needn't read a price from each item, leading to the CAP Theory problem of today.
I suppose that the future will bring back something similar to individual price tags in the form of individual RFID pricing. This way each individual item on a shelf can be priced in a way that is readable by the buyer and the seller in the same manner.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency
An easy test for this is how often the price at the register is higher vs lower than the marked price. If it's close to 50%, then ok, it's a mistake. But if it's higher...
I don't think you would reasonably expect it to be close to 50/50. Most price changes are increases and the mistake theory basically boils down to the employees never updating the shelf tags. Which I think is an extremely plausible theory since the one employee at the store isn't paid enough to bother. And who's even going to check that they updated the tags? Dollar General isn't shelling out money for that.
There's another kind of store that's in a similar situation: thrift stores and nearly all of them have also decided this problem is too hard. Lots of items are marked with just colors based roughly around their estimated value and the store changes the price/color mapping occasionally.
When we are in an environment of 3% annual inflation the day to day price movements will overwhelm the drift of inflation and be basically random in terms of increases vs decreases.
It’s virtually impossible for them because they’re not considering hiring more people to do it.
Dollar General stores often run with one overworked staff member doing everything in the store, from stocking to working the register (which is why the register is unstaffed so much and you have roam the store to find someone to ring you up…)
“Because of conditions of our own making, it is virtually impossible to comply with the law, thus we shouldn’t be held accountable to it.”
It’s the same BS when Meta and others say they can’t moderate posts because there’s too many.
Just make the sticker price legally binding and this issue would be solved with almost perfect precision.
The sticker price is legally binding - it constitutes an offer, and the cash register surreptitiously charging a higher price from what the customer has agreed to constitutes fraud. The problem is that asserting your rights takes time, resources, and energy that people shopping at these stores generally do not have. The people that would have the ability to push back instead just use their resources to move on and shop somewhere else that isn't immediately abusing them.
> The sticker price is legally binding, as it constitutes an offer
While I wish that that were how things worked, unfortunately, the US legal system disagrees [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat#Case_law
That’s about ads, not sticker price on the shelf, and about a lack of obligation to sell at that price. It does not say that it’s alright to lie and charge a different price at the register.
From the Wikipedia article:
> A display of goods for sale in a shop window or within a shop is an invitation to treat, as in the Boots case, a leading case concerning supermarkets. The shop owner is thus not obliged to sell the goods, even if signage such as "special offer" accompanies the display. […] If a shop mistakenly displays an item for sale at a very low price it is not obliged to sell it for that amount.
Boots was a UK court case. The Wikipedia article you linked has a note at the top that it mainly refers to British law.
In the US, local laws generally side with the consumer and legally entitle you to the displayed price. There are also federal laws from the FTC act against deceptive pricing.
See some US state laws here: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/us-retail-pricing-laws-and-regu...
a few summaries from https://www.braincorp.com/resources/the-price-must-be-right-...:
>Michigan requires a bonus of 10 times the overcharge amount.
New Jersey’s Retail Pricing Laws mandate that most retail stores clearly mark the total selling price on most items offered for sale. Retailers must also verify the accuracy of their checkout scanners and may face fines of $50-$100 per violation for noncompliance.
Connecticut law requires stores to charge the lowest of the advertised, posted, or labeled price for an item. Customers who are overcharged are entitled to a refund of the overcharge or $20, whichever is greater
Ah, you indeed appear to be correct. Sorry for the mistake, and thanks for the correction.
"The people that would have the ability to push back"...
And they can. Just bring it up to the cashier or managers attention, and voila, they adjust the price. Please let me know if you have had a different experience.
There's no "just". It takes resources to be scanning your receipt for discrepancies and/or running your own tally. And there are a few examples in the article referencing stores refusing to adjust prices, or of people noticing on their receipt that they were defrauded and the store refusing to reimburse them.
Resources to read the receipt? Are you saying poor people can't do math? Honestly, how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors? If you are really on a tight budget, I guarantee you will be looking over your receipt.
I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
> how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors [compared to your memory of the exact prices of everything you just bought]
> I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.
Yes, this is exactly what I am talking about. Both of those things are straightforwardly doing extra work using your own time and resources. I generally spot check my receipts and do a rough mental tally, but if I had to turn that paranoia to max because some store was continually trying to defraud me, then I would likely stop going there.
If a store refused to adjust a fraudulent charge or honor an offered price, then I would keep escalating the issue and not back down. This too requires resources of having the time to argue, reading as someone who will not simply be browbeaten, plus deescalation and being able to communicate clearly if they call the police, etc.
The hard part is talking to the cashier and waiting for a manager, potentially having to argue with both, and looking like a cheapskate.
If you've ever shopped at dollar stores they are often understaffed with a long line, no self-checkout, and a single cashier on duty if at all. If you argue about pricing you will hold everyone up in line, maybe get dirty looks and possibly wait an hour for someone with the authority to come and clear it up. Another person in this thread also mentioned that they got screamed at and chased out of the store for "causing a problem": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182451
I have been to the Dollar Store (and similar) many times and have never witnessed anyone getting yelled at for saying, "Hey, I think this was a mistake. Can you correct it, please?" (or any other place I shop - especially the grocery stores). We tend to have very positive experiences when pointing out pricing errors. My mother-in-law made it a point to review the receipts ever time we went to the grocery store. No big deal. As other have said, sometimes you get +10% of your money back and other times you get it for free.
Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.
I mean, that person actually got yelled at and had to leave the store. Some are more sensitive than others and just the fear of an unpleasant interaction is enough for some people. I've let small discrepancies slide just because the staff looked overworked and I didn't want to make them stop what they're doing, run down to the aisle and check prices and get their supervisor. For most I think it's just a time thing. It isn't worth a couple dollars to commit to an unpredictable amount of time going back and forth and waiting for a manager. I salute those lions like your MIL who stand their ground and fight back but there are also many, maybe most, who are just in a hurry or want to avoid confrontation.
Thanks, I appreciate your perspective.
One note about asking for a refund/price adjustment. Occasionally the store workers forget to pull the sale prices off the shelf when the sale is over. In these situations, the manager/workers are appreciative since they can pull the sticker that was left on by accident. Just my experience...
Dollar General: "people these days just don't want to work (meaning, my clients don't want to do that work or pay lazy genZers...)!"
From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
This is poor behavior by the stores. The solution will be conversion to eink shelf labels that sync like registers do. Realistically, the fines will not be increased to the point where increasing store staffing and training is cheaper. I don’t know where Dollar General is in this process, but many other c-stores and grocery stores have implemented digital labels. Digital labels come with the temptation to experiment with more dynamic pricing which would also make it harder to shop on a budget. However, high staffing or fines also increases prices. I wish we had better retail in more of the United States, especially needier areas.
I am convinced the wallmarts in Canada are doing dynamic with the eink price tags. I was in the same location twice in a week to pick up snacks for a gathering and the price of chips were 50% more on the Friday vs earlier in the week.
I believe they may in the US, too. Anecdotally, I bought all of the Dr Thunder Zero Sugar at one store twice, and they bumped it about 20% for a few weeks after that. They didn’t change the other generic sodas’ prices.
Seems shortsighted for a retail business since people will only need to get burned once or twice to stop showing up.
For people to vote with their wallet, there has to be an alternative. In "dead" markets where there is only one realistic alternative, whoever holds the monopoly can do whatever the fuck he wants, captive audience.
And no, it's not possible to compete as a startup against Walmart or any other of the corporate giants (and not just in retail, it's valid across industries) - alone because the sheer scale of Walmart allows them to extort insanely cheap pricing out of vendors. Walmart can sell for far cheaper than any mom and pop store can acquire.
They already (at least Target and Walmart) do the “cheaper online than in store”) - if you catch it they’ll price match themselves but who is checking all prices every time?
Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check. As a customer you can take a picture of the price, but then it'll be an argument of "This picture is old/doctored/AI".
Of course the chances of this sort of scam happening are probably not that high, but hey, considering the country is rotting more and more, from the top...
>Huh, with eInk prices, how do customers prove "Wait, the price on the shelf was different!", the store can just change the price as they go to double-check.
Even with paper tags, the store can't get someone to change the price while you're waiting at the cashier for a "manager" to show up?
This is what discovery is for. Changing e-ink tags has an audit trail associated with it.
Snap a pic I guess, there are many ways to game this either way, but if people start catching stores do this then it could lead to issues for the store.
Could it? A gas station doesn't get in trouble if I show up with a photo of yesterday's posted price
I mean if you have a means of validating that a picture was taking at a particular time, then moments later your receipt shows a much larger price then we typically call that evidence.
It seems that we're in a phase where most parts of society is distorting reality to extract value from others. I don't know if it's a usual step in human groups cycles but it's worrisome.
One simple solution here (and for all sorts of legislated fines and thresholds) would be to tie them to inflation; it looks like the fine of $5,000 dates to the early 90s.
The article is about Dollar General and Family Dollar, which are not "dollar stores" in the sense that the average person means.
I noticed my local wal mart doing this, not on every product, but more than one. I had hoped it was an honest mistake until it happened on my next visit. I told an associate about it, left my groceries, and I haven't been back. It's wild to think that a few decades ago they accepted returns of any product based on trust, no questions asked, regardless of whether you had a receipt.
Time for direct action. Record the prices of a trolley full of goods. When a price rings up incorrectly, state loudly that you are not agreeing to that higher price scam and walk out, abandoning your goods at the checkout.
It would be best if a dozen of you went together and so closing all the checkout lanes.
Call a local journalist to come with you.
Stores like Dollar General and Family Dollar are not cheap dollar stores. They are convenience stores. And convenience stores always charge more... for the... convenience of not having to make a longer trip to a larger store. Price mis-labeling aside, the premise of the article is wrong.
It seems fairly obvious that a small store cannot really compete with massive giants like Walmart that invested in electronic interchange formats, logistics and negotiate huge volumes with customers to get to the absolute lowest price.
You can't go to some small store and see them consistently deliver better prices.
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
"This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
——
Dollar stores, even when they're actually giving you low prices (and not just charging $1 for 1 of something that you could get a 3-pack of for $2 elsewhere), are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell—sometimes versions specifically made for them, but without any visible difference in packaging.
Yes, being poor is expensive and people just don't seem to grok that
Take energy. I'm not rich but I'm comfortable, my energy is paid for in an efficient way, I can shop around easily for the best rates for my lifestyle and so on. But if I had no money they'll fit a pay-per-use meter, they charge more money to fill that meter, if I can't fill it or forget to then the power goes out - and it's inconvenient to use it.
Years ago now I had a dispute with the water utility. I refused to pay, so, they eventually concluded that fixing their error was too difficult so they just created a new account starting from zero and wrote off all the costs for the disputed period entirely. If I'd been poor, they'd have threatened to cut off the supply (they're only threatening, fortunately it's not actually legal here to cease supplying clean water to poor people like they're not even animals) and sent scary people to demand payment.
> are often selling lower-quality versions of the products they sell
Clothes brands do this too.
Clothes at the outlet store aren't the same as clothes at Dillards, what's stocked at a struggling Macy's in a relatively poor area may be different from what's available for the same brand at Macy's in Manhattan, and all that may not be the same as what's in their flagship stores.
Sometimes they make it semi-obvious provided you learn their secret label language (Polo by Ralph Lauren, Chaps by Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, and about a half-dozen other major variants, for example). They do this so they can sell shit to unsophisticated consumers at a large mark-up for the name, riding on the reputation and clout of the good versions of what they sell (elsewhere, at even higher prices).
This is definitely illegal in California: California Business and Professions Code Section 12024.2 BPC. It can result up to one year in jail.
I’m not sure how this article is true but seems like as a push to pass a similar law in North Carolina and New Jersey.
dollar tree seems to have found a new way to do this which may or may not be legal. Everything is priced at "$1.25 unless otherwise marked" but the markings don't actually tell you the price, only that it's not the $1.25 default price. There are price checkers throughout the store, but unless you're stopping and prescanning all of your stuff there's no actual way to know what you'll be paying until you get to the register. My partner is a regular there for cheap craft supplies and has seen what essentially amounts to dynamic pricing there, with the price varying up and down on the same item week by week.
They overcharge also via providing low quality products that seem comparable to name brands. Like the loosely wrapped toilet paper roles that have a fraction of what a normal roll has.
Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.
You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.
I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).
https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...
I’m having a hard time parsing your comment.
> Article Context-free raw #'s
What does this mean?
> no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK.
So? The article is very specific from the beginning it was an investigation on two specific chains. That different stores may also do it does not invalidate the point.
> Dad journalism
Did you mean “bad journalism”, or is “dad journalism” a term with meaning (like “armchair psychologist”)? B and D aren’t that close on a typical QWERTY, but maybe it was a wrong autocorrect?
> You should not update on this article
Also here. I’m guessing “update” was meant to be a different word? I don’t understand what you mean.
> (…) a national report found that (…)
Which is useful information, but (again) does nothing for the article’s point. Because other stores do it, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth reporting that these ones do too. The article isn’t saying these are the only chains engaging the the practice. Furthermore, the point matters because the people who need to frequent dollar stores are the ones who are already cash strapped.
The article goes deeper than just presenting some numbers, it argues for why exactly this matters, why it happens, and why it isn’t being fixed.
> Article Context-free raw #'s
"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for national chain
> Dad journalism
"Bad" Typo, sorry
> You should not update on this article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
> (…) a national report found that (…)
The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad. Whether or not this is correct necessarily depends on a comparison with other stores.
> Is this a lot or a little?
Seems to me that failing any inspection is bad. 4300 in three years and in half the country is clearly a lot. That’s almost four failed inspections per day, double the number of mass shootings (which is also too high and even one is bad).
Also, the paragraphs immediately following what you quoted provide more context. Over 50% error rate is obviously a lot, as is failing 28 inspections in a row.
> The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad.
Is it? Seems to me the thesis of the article is how this broken system is punishing poor people even further: “As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it”. Which parts specifically make you believe that the thesis of the article is that these stores are uniquely bad?
In Austria the retailer simply has to honor their lowest labeled price. Only clear and obvious errors like if the price would be just cents instead of euros are exempt
> that would involve paying for a bus ride. “I don’t have money like that,”
inconvenience aside, are buses so expensive that you wouldn't save any money by going to a different store?
I had a clerk flip out on me a while back at a Dollar Tree because I wanted a charge for a dollar -- it rang up as 1.25. They rolled their eyes and told me not everything is a dollar, and I maintained that absent pricing stickers indicating otherwise, the default is a dollar. When I pointed out another way to look at it is it's a twenty five percent price discrepancy, someone came out of an office and literally screamed at me and chased me out of the store for "causing a problem", telling me that if I'm going to cause problems, so will she.
I wasn't cursing or yelling, just calmly making the points I made above as the employees took a dive bar approach to customer service...
It doesn't surprise me at all that this kind of thing is intentional -- they're banking on you not walking out without the item having carried it to the checkout.
"the default is a dollar"
There is no default price.
I can't cite details, but I believe that case law has settled this many times.. When a customer enters a commercial business, there are implied contracts that are enforceable.. I am thinking of restaurants first. I believe it is the responsibility of the goods and services provider to show prices accurately and honor them, and variations of that are well-understood in court. These kind of transactions are common for thousands of years in the West.
It's called "dollar tree" for a reason, historically prices were and are a dollar unless otherwise noted.
They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press.
>They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press.
I'd love to see a citation on that, since I think you're mistaken -- there's plenty of things that are still a dollar, mostly stuff like packages of napkins or plastic cups, cards and other sundries.
(What was extensively covered was that they were no longer a "everything is a dollar" store.)
Citations:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/grocery/shopping/2025/12/04/d...
https://www.businessinsider.com/dollar-tree-raises-some-pric...
https://www.the-sun.com/money/14719523/dollar-tree-sneaky-co...
They are attributing malice/greed to what is more likely just incompetence compounded by inflation. The employees most likely haven't updated the pricing on the shelves. If you have ever been in a DG or DT, you can see that the inventory is generally a mess and just put everywhere. There is one or two people up at the front. They don't have as many people stocking shelves as a grocery store to keep the inventory in order.
I never heard of something like this happening in Europe. Do we simply have better control and regulations?
In Ireland, knowingly charging more than th display price is a criminal offence; the fake sales mentioned in the article are also illegal, though I’m not sure if that one’s criminal or civil. I expect it’s similar elsewhere.
_Prosecution_ is often more of an effective threat for companies than summary fines, as judges will tend to throw the book at repeat offenders.
Also, the nature of US urbanisation might be a factor. If you can get to more stores easily it’s harder for them to screw your; you will just go elsewhere.
I tend to do my shopping in small batches when walking home from work, and have a decent short term memory for numbers. I don’t remember _ever_ being overcharged by the likes of Tesco/Lidl/whatever. Very occasionally by small shops.
At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.
We might also acknowledge that a pretty significant share of people do know that already and just shrug their shoulders to it, convinced that it's better to allow for that than do anything about it.
There's been a lot of work put into distilling "free market" into its most radical interpretation, and lots of people just aren't open to bringing much nuance or pragmatism to bear upon it any more. Many lessons learned painfully in late 19th and early 20th century have been forgotten and the counterweight and containment policies that they earned now tend to get ignored or dismantled.
And somehow instead of trying to make it better, there are never ending attempts to make it even worse somehow ( if some of the patents are to believed ). I honestly sometimes wonder if some of the stuff is not in place already only because public reaction if all those were plopped in place in one go.
Well, why don't the ethical non-predators open up shops in economically disadvantaged areas and offer non-predatory prices? The margins must be huge if they really are predators.
Good question, was on my mind too. The problem I could see is Walmart style - the predator will beat the prices of the non-predator down until the non-predator goes out of business, then raise their prices again.
They can do this because they are operating in other areas with predatory prices, giving them the ability to operate at a loss, and relying on the fact that at least some of those areas are not being challenged by non-predators.
Everybody seems to be playing the game right in this scenario. Interesting to try to come up with a good counter.
Does this actually happen? If a community opened up a co-op shop that started eating into the revenue of a dollar store, would the dollar store company try to fight back, or would they just exit that market?
Yes, I guess well capitalize companies could offer unrealistically low prices, but on the other hand, any kind of co-op or community driven organization has the benefit of not needing the margins. Dollar store investors are there to make a buck, if their capital isn't getting reasonable returns will ultimately exit the business and move somewhere else.
Cooperatives do not get rid of the net negative cycle. Ultimately whatever the benevolent entity ends up being, it becomes a contest of who can bear to lose more money.
Cooperatives distribute the losses but it is still a money pit.
The loot is already spoken for by complements and embedded in real estate prices, stock prices, etc.
Hobbes arguments can rationalize any Nash Equilibrium.
Isn't it just the predators that care about stock price to enrich themselves? Couldn't a co-op exist which offered non-predatory pricing and didn't try to maximize their stock price constantly? And real estate in destitute rural areas is generally dirt cheap.
Of course this could be offered. But, no one wants to do it because it's a thankless job. And if you're going to do a thankless job, you'd probably rather get paid a lot of money to do it than very little
You're ducking the argument. The loot from predatory practices is quickly absorbed not just by the single player perpetuating them, but by their complements in the economic network -- complements which a competitor would have to deal with on the loot-enriched terms, which turn launders exploitation into a "necessity" and transforms any charity into a weakness that will ensure your replacement. That's what Nash Equilibrium is, and it's an elementary result of game theory that Nash Equilibrium can lie very far from the global optimum. Even the global minimum can be a Nash Equilibrium. We should aspire to do better.
Always has been.
It really wasn't this bad in the past on a whole. There were plenty of bad actors, but EVERY actor wasn't bad.
Just look at food recipes American corporations feed to Americans, and their different recipes for Europe that look more like the American recipes circa the 1990s. Everything in America is optimised to the max permissible bad action.
There is one overriding difference between US culture and European culture (and to a fading extent, British culture).
In the EU and UK, shame still motivates better behaviour.
Every single problem the USA has comes down to the fact that shame, in the USA, stopped functioning in the late 1970s.
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Yeah. Why do I have to pay a plumber to install gas appliances? It's just a protectionist racket.
Point is, it's easy to screech "predation" or whatever but the problem is that every one of these things has some justification that can be used in the abstract.
It does legitimately cost more to run a store like Dollar General than Walmart so the same can of beans has to cost more on their shelf for the same margin.
How much more, how much is justified? I don't know.
A justification for lying to poor people about the prices of things they're trying to buy? Do tell.
I know we're all idiots here because that's what easy tech money does to people but retail margins are razor thin. You can't just make thoughtless trite statements about what they "should" do because a few percent here and there is the difference between red and black and red means prices go up. I'm sure they're happy to not invest in accuracy when it makes them money but there's a pretty wide gulf between being sloppy because it suits you and actively making a business out of deceit.
As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions.
Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.
Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.
in 2025 I'm surprised you can't just scan everything on your phone yourself and get the up-to-date price. are there laws stating things must be a posted price? seems easier for everyone to have something you can scan that show you the latest price, or auto updating tags.
Looks like Dollar Tree just rolled out a feature where you can do a price check on items by using their App.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DollarTree/comments/1ndmniz/downloa...
Auto-updating tags can be incorrect, too.
The saddest part is the feedback loop
Cash strapped, but also presumably more likely than the general population to be innumerate or have dyscalculia or dyslexia.
It's the same bullshit that allows discount prices on Black Friday or during January sales to be completely misleading.
In the UK we are much tougher on this kind of manipulative pricing, but you still find manipulative things, like being unable to find the price-per-100g on discounted items and "clubcard" items, or bulk buys that end up having higher unit costs and yet seem not to be errors.
Dollarama Inc. stock price is up 273% in the last 5 years.
This once again shows that idiocracy was an overly optimistic movie.
Am I the only one who checks their receipt after checking out from grocery or department store shopping?
> Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.
We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.
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Listen, I know we all love to circle jerk about how dollar stores are evil, but you can walk into just about any regional chain supermarket and replicate the same exercise and get about the same results.
I check prices on my reciepts. I shop at Costco, Walmart, 99 Ranch, Sprouts, and Trader Joe's.
I'm fairly certain the error rate for all those shops is less than 5%.
What a rude, dismissive comment about a very real issue affecting real people.
Sorry, real people who are on a real (strict) budget pay attention to the price of goods when they shop. If you are really hurting from a $3 overcharge, chances are you pay very close attention to the register receipt and bring it to the store's attention. Regardless of income, my wife and I routinely scrutinize the register receipt. Force of habit.
Can you? I think the implicit counterclaim in TFA is that other supermarkets/stores don't fail state pricing inspections nearly as often. If you have evidence/articles showing that TFA has cherry-picked dollar stores for criticism, that would be helpful to share.
I've got one local grocery store where the meat prices are sometimes off and another where it's the bakery. The fact that it seems to be confined to certain departments makes think it has a lot to do with the quantity and quality of labor being applied. And dollar stores being dollar stores they apply the cheapest and they apply it sparingly. Not that that excuses it but it at least explains it.
what's the point of this hit piece? isnt that frying pan with a sticker price of $10 and rung up at $12 still $50 anywhere else?
I don’t think this is true. Even if pricing in the shelves is accurate, in my experience Dollar General is typically a little more expensive than a normal mid-range supermarket (or e.g. Amazon) for most things.
Could work like this:
1. You help your friend wash the dishes and notice their hefty, 5-quart stainless steel pot. You look it up on Amazon and it's like $50.
2. At $store, you see something that looks like that size and style of pot, but for only $10. What a steal! It's even ultralight so it should be easier to load in the dishwasher...
*Several months later*
3. Your pot is all warped to hell, making it difficult to cook evenly. But your friend's pot is probably fine for the next few decades if not longer. (Note: if this were an oven pan the warping would make it dangerous to use.)
4. To add insult to injury, $store got two more of your dollars just because.
I picked the 5-quart pot because I've seen one of these with my own eyes.
In any case, OP would have been better off paying me $38 for nothing but crushing their dream of buying a decent quality $10 frying pan.
That's what I think people don't really get about being poor. They _know_ they are cash strapped. and like a cash strapped business, managing cash flow is more important than log term investments.
They _know_ buying a small bottle of dish detergent is more expensive per oz, but buying in bulk would require a 15-16 week lead across all their purchase categories.
then why do poor people shop there? is the idea dollar general is strategically misleading them to see prices advertised lower than a normal supermarket but in fact they are higher? i didn't think the article was making that strong of a claim at all. it seemed more like, operations are minimal and staffing short (which in theory enables lower prices) and they linked the staffing issue with simply just not being on top of updating price changes on the shelves
1) Misleading advertising? Yes. Obviously this is true if you accept both that their prices are generally higher, and that they’re advertising low prices.
2) They’re in more convenient locations - often on the drive home already - and are smaller so are faster to get in and out of when you’re hurrying to or from work.
3) If you’re _not_ working, they’re probably cheaper to _get to_, especially if you can’t drive, because they’re closer.
I’m not as up in arms about this as some - in some respects this is just a new iteration of the corner store or bodega, which have always been a little more expensive than supermarkets (and often a little disorganized…) - but it is the truth.
> then why do poor people shop there?
While the typical viewpoint is that "poor people" shop there, that's actually somewhat of a misnomer.
Most dollar stores in the US are located in rural locations, and in part because a lot of rural population is also "lower income" they get the appearance of "only the poor shop there". But the part the folks who label the stores as "for the poor" often overlook is the "ruralness" aspect. That dollar store might only be a five to ten minute drive away to grab something, meanwhile the Walmart or Target or other, that likely has the better deal (the 128oz of Tide for 9.99 vs the 8oz of Tide for $1.50) is a forty-five minute drive away one way. So couple 1.5 hours round trip commute, plus fuel costs for that 1.5 hours, and you start to see why folks would more likely shop at the dollar store vs. the store that actually gives them the better deal overall.
That's partly the "magic" of the dollar stores for corporate. They sprout up like weeds in rural areas much like Starbucks sprout up on every corner in cities. And they capture sales largely because by sprouting up like weeds, they are a shorter round-trip drive to grab sometime (esp. to grab those one or two things you forgot last weekend when you /did/ make the 1.5 hour round trip drive to go to the nearest Walmart for the better deals). These store's sales largely come from the 7-11/Starbucks method in the city: convenience.
And couple the above with the fact that in rural USA, there is effectively zero public transportation and very little in the form of uber/cab companies, and so if one does not have a car, one may be stuck shopping at the dollar store 5-10 minutes away even if one knows the stores are gouging.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are smaller stores that are generally the only option within a reasonable travel distance. Here in the South, you might be able to catch a bus to Wal-Mart, but it’ll take 2-3X more time (1 hour instead of 20 minutes), so people go with the closer option even thought it is more expensive. No guarantees that Wal-Mart will be cheaper either.
In Chicago they closed the Wal-marts leaving only the Dollar Generals and Dollar Trees as the only walkable stores.
Is it a hit piece if it’s true lol?
> listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50
I'm sure the US obsession with not putting the actual price (tax included) on the shelf helps a lot with this. I would notice quite quickly if a store would systematically overcharge me in Europe. It'd be much harder in the US where I expect the price on the shelf to not match the price at checkout.
Those prices aren't because of tax; even the highest sales tax wouldn't cause $10.99 paper towels to ring up as $15.50.
Yes, but the US consumers are conditioned to see one price and pay a higher price. You and I might see +40% and think "that's too high a percentage". Others see +something and think "just like every other time". If they even look - I'm sure these items are often in a cart with many other items.
The stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store. They might remember one or two, but they won't remember (and therefore will not notice) enough of the shelf prices to notice the systematic overcharge at the register. In reality, a good number of the shoppers likely don't remember any of the prices from the shelf tags, and will not be mentally summing up what the final price should be, so those shoppers won't notice the discrepancy at all.
> stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store
We don't bother remembering it because we're in a high-enough trust society where that burden shouldn't be necessary.
Were. You were in a high-enough trust society. As evidenced by this investigation.
I'm pretty sure the problem is "companies try to screw over poor people", and not "the sticker price doesn't include the tax".